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Copenhagen and the price of civilization

by Paula | 12 December 2009 | permalink | comments
Tags: evolution, systems
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Last night I was listening to Democracy Now on my way home from my nephew’s birthday, mainly because WPSU was the only station that came in clearly on the radio, as the road from my brother’s house is sandwiched between two of those long Pennsylvania ridges. Anyway, I normally wouldn’t listen to Democracy Now as I find Ms. Goodman to be every bit as clueless and irrelevant an ideologue as her counterparts on the right; but in the interest of curiosity I gave it a listen. And I must say, I am deeply disappointed with what’s coming out of Copenhagen.

If you haven’t tried this yet, give it a whirl: track down coverage of Copenhagen from genuinely diverse sources. It’s like watching a bunch of monkeys in a burning cage battling over who’s going to get burned to death first. The rich monkeys are farthest from the flames and they’re not willing to trade places with the poor monkeys. The poor monkeys, for their part, jump and shout and shrill about the unfairness of it all. And meanwhile, not a single monkey dares voice the observation that all are trapped in a cage, that they all got in there somehow which means there must be a door through which to leave.

But no one at Copenhagen dare utter the truth: environmental degradation is the price of civilization. There’s just simply no way around this. There has never been a sustainable civilization — never, not even once, ever, in all of human history.

Without stopping to consider what they were doing, various political and economic deciders over the past 50 or so years have enlarged civilization into something that has never before happened: a global civilization that envelopes nearly every square inch of both land and water on the planet. Global environmental devastation is the only possible result.

Reallocating capital is not going to fix this. Sleek new technologies are not going to fix it. Cap-and-trade is not going to fix it, increased population density is not going to fix it — and for that matter, a massive global reduction in population won’t fix it either.

The only thing that can fix the problem of anthropogenic environmental devastation is to do away with civilization. That means either a return to hunter-forager style societies or the development of a new kind of civilization, so different it would probably require a word other than “civilization.”

Lots of people subscribe to the notion that a return to hunter-forager life is appropriate, and I completely understand why and sympathize with their desires. I personally am not too keen on permanent camping, however, so I tend to focus on the other direction.

Civilization is a system that is completely dependent upon material inputs from the environment in order to exist. Moreover, the civilization system doesn’t just simply sit on top of the biosphere and suck up its life force. It sits laterally on the planet next to the biosphere and competes with it at its point of origin: sunlight.

In any topside ecosystem, plants draw nutrients from the soil and combine these with the energy of sunlight in a process call photosynthesis. The result of photosynthesis is the building of plant cells, which we see as leaves, stems, flowers, seeds and such.

Plants are called producers because they almost magically take the invisible and make it into something material and useful. The nutrients and energy they originally used are stored in their cells, which get eaten by primary consumers — herbivores such as rabbits, deer, and seed-eating birds. These animals concentrate the stored nutrients and solar energy stored in the plants’ biomass as muscle and organs. These, in turn, are eaten by secondary consumers, which are carnivores such as cats, hawks, canines, snakes and such, which concentrate the stored nutrients and sunlight even more densely. Decomposers break down the waste from these and return nutrients to the soil. And the cycle continues.

Civilization usurps the normal flow of sunlight and nutrients through an ecosystem by wiping out all plant life on a given piece of land and replacing these with a handful of producers that serve its own ends. These of course are the cereal grains: wheat, rice, corn, oats and the like.

Then at harvest the sunlight and nutrients stored in the cereal grains are divorced utterly from the natural food chain. The energy and nutrients are converted into gold and silver, representing the sunlight and soil nutrients contained in the grain — in other words, representing their value, a thing that does not exist outside of civilization. The gold and silver are then systematically concentrated among fewer individuals at increasingly removed distances from the grains’ point of origin, a dim reflection of the flow of solar energy and nutrients through a proper food chain. And because there is no way to turn waste directly into gold or silver — it is waste because it has no value — the waste piles up with no civilized counterpart to shit-eating bugs and microorganisms. (How uncivilized!)

For this reason, any response that does not address the bifurcation point that is agriculture completely misses the mark. Even the ecovillage and/or subsistence-farming-for-all “solutions” miss the mark because these do not address the problem’s point of origin. At best, these are like monkeys in a cage who strive to keep the fires burning at a level that poses no immediate threat. That is, until some other monkey gets thrown into the cage who decides to build the fire bigger.

If there is ever to be such a thing as an ecologically sustainable civilization, it must begin by not only measuring the value undisturbed ecosystems have to civilization, but also by somehow making that value available for use within civilization. In our current global economic and ecological circumstances — arguments about “what should be” or “what shouldn’t be” are useless, we can only start where we are — that means monetizing the value of undisturbed ecosystems.

If this can be done, it would mean big corporations stop plundering and start replanting because it is more profitable to do so. It would mean there’d be more money to be had in reducing carbon emissions than in creating them. It would level the playing field between rich nations and poor nations, because poor nations haven’t had the money to plunder their landscapes the way we rich nations have. It would mean coal left in the ground would generate more jobs and more returns on investment than coal pulled out of the ground and burned. In short, it would erase the bifurcation point that agriculture currently represents, and align civilization with normal, natural Earth processes. It would allow us monkeys to not only open and leave the cage, but to then turn around and put out the fire properly.

This is why I focus on business. Such a re-alignment isn’t going to come from academia, or activism, or any political process. None of these can even imagine anything other than left versus right inside the cage. Business, however, is not so limited. Money, like water, takes the shape of its container, and it is business that is the container for money. It would take just one person to profit once by leaving an ecosystem alone in order for that business model to spread through the economy. It would allow civilization to evolve, to adapt, to our given realities.

Such business plans do exist. It’s very unfortunate they get so little air, and certainly will not have any place at Copenhagen. Thinking outside the paradigm is nearly impossible but there are some who can manage it. I do hope Copenhagen spurs them to start speaking up. 

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