sitakali

Forty years after the onset of environmentalism, even the largest, most powerful corporations and governments cannot ignore the natural environment in which we live. By this, of course, I mean that they cannot ignore that most people care about the environment now. It is no longer logical to fight against mainstream environmentalism. So what do these powerful bodies do to address people’s concerns?

Do they change their business models to protect the environment?

Do they begin to focus more on ecological health than profit?

Do they even stop practices that are the most detrimental to the environment?

No, of course not. You wouldn’t expect them to, would you?

A corporation is an organization with a corporate charter – a contract that legally binds the organization to prioritize profit (or, more accurately, shareholder returns) over absolutely everything else. Corporations are legally obligated to do anything within their power to prevent decrease in profit – this includes lying to the public, destroying communities and ecosystems, and ultimately breaking the law.

A government is an organization of powerful people who were (in a democratic nation) s/elected from a slightly larger pool of powerful people. The populace is given a choice between several evils, and tries to choose the lesser. Governments obey the laws of neo-classical economics; a system that prioritizes economic growth over all else. In other words, governments are beholden to the corporations that keep the economy going. This is why corporations frequently get away with breaking the law.

So, in order to placate the general populace’s newfound concerns about the environment, corporations and governments must use something called greenwashing. Greenwashing involves advertising and empty promises about environmental sustainability.

This is all made possible by our ages-old unnatural anthropocentric view of the world. It is one thing to instinctively value humans over other creatures – for example, if I saw a human child and a kitten in the middle of the street about to be hit by a car, and I had to make a choice, I’d save the child (though some might not). That’s a concept that I like to call “natural” anthropocentrism. But then there’s “unnatural” anthropocentrism – the view that humans are mostly disconnected from the rest of the universe. That is where sustainability comes in.

Starting with the Rio Earth Summit of 1992 and Kyoto Protocol of 1997, nations around the world began to promise to fight for environmental sustainability – or, more oxymoronically, what they like to call “sustainable development.” This involves continued economic growth and use of resources, using slightly less resource-intense materials and technologies. The idea is that we can be sustainable and not have to change the basic tenets of our economic system. And while sustainable development policy proposals, most notably Agenda 21 (which came out of the Rio Earth Summit), call for support for sustainable farming systems, they don’t highlight the most important aspect of sustainable farming: a move away from neo-classical economics.

This is all based around a new model of economics, also known as sustainable economics or sustainability politics. It looks like this:

Basically, they took their original economic ideas and squished another thing into it: “Lets make another circle. And call it ‘environment.’ “

Without me telling you, what is wrong with this picture?

…..

Okay, if you must know, the problem is that it is not representative of reality. In reality, we are a single species that is strongly interconnected to the rest of the world. Our environment is all around us, whether we like it or not. Every molecule we breathe, every gram of iron, milliliter of petroleum we use, comes from our environment. Everything in our economy comes from the environment; even our thoughts and services, which wouldn’t exist without the resources we need to survive. We come from the environment. It is inescapable. So rather than having a tiny fraction of our economic system overlap with the environment, economics is a small part of our larger world.

This is what the diagram should look like:

But imagine if economists and world leaders actually took this view. Every action would have to come with consideration of the impacts to the environment first, before even profit. After all, if we don’t have a planet, then we don’t have humans, and if we don’t have humans, we don’t have an economy. Then would come the realization that we’re all interconnected. What effect could this possibly have? People would no longer be able to treat other people, or other creatures, like simply exploitable objects and labour. All effects would have to be considered. The path of least harm would be taken, after serious thought and consideration. In essence, our economic system as we know it would disappear.

Even deeper – we would realize that there is no reason to trust a bunch of powerful, wealthy elites more than anybody else. The elites would step down anyway, because they would understand the detrimental effects of their authoritarian leadership, and that they are no more worthy of leadership than anybody else. Our system would lose its hierarchy.

We would become anarchists.

~ by sitakali on 17 February, 2012.

Posted in Social Environmentalist
Tags: agriculture, anarchism, capitalism, economics, environmentalism, humanity