A strategy for ensuring the habitability of our planet

The Chairman (Sara Parkin): Edward Goldsmith is best known as a publisher and an editor of books and magazines, particularly The Ecologist. He has written many books, has taught at universities and is President of a variety of associations. He has also won awards, including the Right Livelihood Award which is known as the alternative Nobel Prize with which he was presented in Stockholm in 1991. He was made a Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur this year.

His book, Blueprint for Survival, and The Ecologist magazine had a tremendous impact not only on me but a very large number of people at the time the book was published in 1972. He wrote a dedication in my copy of his latest book, The Way: towards an ecological world view, published in 1992, “to Sara and to a Green Government”. A Green Government may sound unlikely today but I think it won’t be in a few years time. Twenty years on Teddy is still writing, he is still optimistic and he is still inspiring.

By now, it should be clear that our environment is becoming ever less capable of sustaining the growing impact of our economic activities. Everywhere our forests are overlogged, our agricultural lands over-cropped, our grasslands overgrazed, our wetlands overdrained, our groundwaters overtapped, our seas overfished, and just about the whole terrestrial and marine environment overpolluted with chemical and radioactive poisons.

Worse still, if that is possible, our atmospheric environment is becoming ever less capable of absorbing either the ozone depleting gases or the greenhouse gases that are generated by our economic activities without creating new climatic conditions to which man cannot indefinitely adapt.

In such conditions, there can only be one way of maintaining the habitability of our planet and that is to set out methodically to reduce the impact on it of our economic activities. Unfortunately, however, that process we refer to as ‘economic development’, to which modern society is totally geared, involves systematically increasing this impact.

This means that we can only maintain the habitability of our planet by changing the very direction in which our society is moving. This is clearly a tall order, since it means changing the way our socially-atomised society is organised, as it is today, into corporations and government institutions that, by their very nature, must be committed to economic development.

It also means changing the world-view with which we have all been imbued – a world-view that is faithfully reflected in the paradigms of science and of modern economics and in the light of which, economic development is seen as providing a veritable panacea for all our ills, be they biological, social, ecological or economic.

Instead, we must seek to create a decentralised society in which economic activities are conducted on a much smaller scale, using less energy and resource intensive methods of production and catering for a smaller local, or at most regional, market – a society that is also imbued with a world-view in the light of which human welfare is primarily assured by the preservation of our social and ecological environment.

All this has been quite clear to most thoughtful members of the ecological or Green movement since it came into its own in the late 1960s, but many were often embarrassed to state it explicitly, for fear of being ridiculed, especially during the economic and technological euphoria of the Reagan-Thatcher years. However, the situation is suddenly changing, and changing very quickly, so much so that, as I shall try to show, the development of such a society will almost certainly be required, not just for environmental reasons, but in order to prevent the disintegration of society, the breakdown of the state, and the collapse of the formal economy.

From the point of view of the habitability of our planet, this is good news indeed, for it means that the argument for the localised economy need no longer be exclusively environmental, which most people find too distant and too abstract, but can now become socio-economic and hence more directly related to their everyday concerns.

The most obvious socio-economic problem that has suddenly become acute is growing unemployment. Today (August 1993 figures) there are 17 million unemployed in the EC. According to the EC Commissioners the figure is expected to be 19.2 million by the end of the year and 24 million by the end of 1994. [Bernard Cassen, "La Societe Sacrifiee au Libre Echange", Le Monde Diplomatique July 1993.]

In Eastern Europe it was only 3.4 percent in 1989 but with the opening up of that area to the free market it has escalated and is expected to be up to 20 percent next year. In sub-Saharan Africa, it was already 18 percent in 1980 and is expected to be 31 percent by the year 2000. The problem is thus a global one – except in South East Asia, an area that is temporarily undergoing an economic boom – at terrible social and environmental costs. Worldwide, according to Dr Mahbub Ul Haq, who directed the recently published 4th United Nations Human Development Report, one billion new jobs will have to be found by the year 2000, and it is not at all clear how this will be possible.

Today the problem is attributed to the recession and thereby to the slow and, in some countries, negative growth rate of GNP. But this is not realistic, for fully 20 years ago it was clear that economic growth could not provide jobs on anything like the scale required. An OECD study in 1973, for instance, concluded that to eliminate unemployment and under-employment in India within a decade, would have required an impossible 30-35 percent annual growth in industrial output.

An International Labour Organization (ILO) study stressed at the time that

“there is not the remotest hope that Western technology with its capital-intensive bias, can create the basis for ensuring employment to the over 184 million additional job seekers in India during the next 27 years leading up to 2000 AD.” [F.A. Mehta, Employment, Basic Needs and Growth Strategy for India, Geneva, ILO, 1976.]

Even the World Bank realised this as early as 1972. “No imaginable rate of increase in industrial and service output”, it insisted, “can absorb the expected supply of workers”. [World Bank Development Review, 1972.]

The only solution, it maintained, was “rural development”, which became the overt theme of its policies during the McNamara period. Rural development, however, was but a dream, since by its very nature economic development, the Bank’s overall goal, could only lead to the emptying of rural areas and the rapid concentration of the bulk of humanity, as is occurring today in vast urban slums. To revitalise the rural areas, if that is what “rural development” was supposed to do, it would have meant reversing economic development and that was clearly out of the question.

It is now at last dawning on our Western politicians that this is not just a problem for the Third World. Throughout Europe, economic growth, which itself is becoming ever more difficult to achieve, is also proving ever less capable of providing the necessary jobs. In France, for instance, according to the EC Commissioners, even with a 2.4 percent rate of economic growth unemployment will increase from 10 percent in 1993 to 12.6 percent in the year 2000 – a conservative prediction, because at the moment of writing unemployment has already reached a level of 11.5 percent.

The seriousness of the situation can only be truly appreciated if we consider that unemployment does not simply mean material deprivation. A job in an industrial society provides people with much more than material benefits. It also provides people, who in an atomised society have been deprived of an extended family and a cohesive community, with a surrogate social environment and hence with a feeling of security, an identity and a goal structure, all of which are psychologically difficult to dispense with.

It is not surprising that prolonged unemployment -and let us not forget that some 50 percent of the unemployed in the EC today have been unemployed for over a year – leads to all sorts of social deviations. Marital breakdowns are the most obvious, as unemployed husbands are most likely to vent their frustrations and loss of self-esteem on their wives and families.

It also leads to a rise in the incidence of alcoholism, drug addiction and other expedients for insulating the victims from an environment that has ceased to satisfy basic psychological needs, and also of delinquency and crime, which provide a new outlet for the energies of those who have no place in the formal economy. It is no coincidence that the incidence of all these behavioural aberrations is rapidly increasing, nor that it should be highest among teenagers, especially those from minority groups among whom unemployment levels are particularly high.

As Hubert Hill, of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP warned as far back as 1975, “The disastrous rate of unemployment among black youths is the single most explosive factor for causing potential social unrest”. [Time Magazine 17 March 1975.] The recent highly destructive riots in Los Angeles can only serve as a stark reminder of Hill’s warning, and few suppose that they will be the last, nor that they will be confined to the USA.

Indeed, today even the EC Commissioners now admit that the expected unemployment rates in the EC might well pose a threat to “good order” and “social cohesion”. Why unemployment is increasing is well known, but it is not generally appreciated to what extent it is inevitable, if we continue on our present path towards further economic development and hence how drastic must be the measures required to bring it under control.

One reason is the increasing number of people seeking to enter the work force.This is largely because salaries calculated in real terms are falling in spite of economic growth,which means that, in view of the increasing cost of living, one salary perfamily no longer suffices – a situation that has been achieved years ago in the Third World.

Consider that in the USA between the years 1978 and 1988 7.5 million new male jobs were created, but by 1988, 18.4 million men had jobs with wages that were below the 1978 level. During the decade in question, wages fell for as many as two-thirds of US workers, both male and female and we must not forget that the 1980s were a period of unprecedented and probably unrepeatable economic growth. [Edward N. Luttwak, Centre for Strategic and International Studies, Washington.]

In the EC the situation is similar and as a result married women as well as their husbands must now go out to work. In the UK only 9.6 percent of married women entered employment in 1911. The figure had risen to 42.3 percent in 1971. It is still higher now and still rising. [New Prospects for the Future Labour Force, Department of Employment Gazette, London 1976.] According to the European Commission, 25 million new jobs will be required by the year 2010 just to cope with the growth of the EC’s labour force. [Colin Hines and Tim Lang, The New Protectionism, Zed Books, 1993.]

If the number of people looking for jobs must increase, so must the availability of jobs decrease. This is because it is economic to substitute machines for people – one of the basic methods for assuring economic development, a process that has already gone so far in agricultural that the USA’s massive agricultural production is now achieved with some 2 percent of its work force.

The US’s biggest manufacturing industries (primary metals, stones, clay and glass, food, chemical and paper) provided no new employment at all between the years 1950-1970. In the steel industry employment actually declined by more than four times from 1959 to 1969, even though production increased by 45 percent. [Dollars and Sense, Environmentalist for Full Employment, September 1976.]

Not surprisingly, in recent years it is the service sector (education, welfare, entertainment, travel, etc) that has provided most of the jobs. Unfortunately, however, these jobs are now being automated too. The development of such new fields as robotics, artificial intelligence, digital imagery and data storage is increasingly reducing employment in the service sector.

What is more, it is precisely these technologies that President Clinton has decided to encourage as a means of revitalising the US economy. [Jeremy Rifkin, The New York Times, 24 February 1993.] Already, as Rifkin notes, the postal service plans to sack 47,000 workers by 1995 because new computers will be able to take over the task of reading letters and sorting mail. AT & T plans to replace some 6,000 operators by robots that can distinguish between key words of speech. Rifkin considers that “most American workers are employed in tasks that can be done by computers, automated machinery and robots”.

The problem is compounded by the fact that much of the service sector is non-profitmaking, and must be funded by the government, and, as we shall see, the government is ever less capable of meeting the growing cost of doing so. Another problem is that in the service sector large corporations, with economic development, are rapidly taking over from small ones. Thus in the UK, supermarkets are rapidly replacing small shops.

Tesco plans to open 25 new supermarkets every year. Sainsbury’s already handles one-sixth of Britain’s food in its 292 stores. This volume of business, as Richard Douthwaite notes, would in 1950 have been generated by 37,000 small shops of different sorts. [The Growth Illusion, Green Books, 1992.] These would have employed 130,000 full-time and 24,000 part-time staff, compared with the 38,089 full-time and 61,932 part-time staff employed by Sainsbury’s in 1990. In other words, the replacement of so many small shops by Sainsbury’s supermarkets has led to threefold reduction in full-time jobs, a nearly threefold increase in part-time jobs, and a third reduction in jobs in general, whether full-time or part-time.

The trend towards part-time jobs, like the trend towards the replacement of jobs by machines, is justified as a means of increasing efficiency and competitiveness, which are seen as a sine qua non for economic development. It is part of the same strategy to replace male with female employees, for the latter are willing to work for lower wages, earning about 60 percent less than men in the UK and are also less averse to working part-time.

Significantly, in the UK almost 90 percent of new jobs created since 1970 have gone to women, so that half the labour force now consists of women, half of whom are working part-time. Not surprisingly, male unemployment is now much higher than female unemployment – 14.1 percent compared to 5.6 percent for women. [Karen and Rachel Borrell, "The New Proletariat", The Independent 16 May 1993.]

Women are therefore no longer just supplementing their husbands’ income, they are now replacing men in a big way. Socially, this cannot be a desirable trend. It must give rise to a growing number of frustrated unemployed men, kept by their wives, who are on a miserable part-time salary. What effect this will have on the already disintegrating family, on the growing rate of crime, delinquency and alcoholism, is not known. I doubt if any of our political or industrial leaders have ever bothered to ask.

All these trends can only be exacerbated when, or rather if, all the planned Free Trade deals such as NAFTA, Maastricht (which provides the political and legal framework for the EC) and the GATT Uruguay Round are implemented. These deals are largely justified on the grounds that they will provide more jobs, but there is no evidence of any kind to justify this thesis.

Indeed, world trade in both primary commodities and manufactured goods has increased by 11 times since 1950, from about $400 million to $3.5 trillion, yet unemployment rates have risen rather than fallen during this period. [Hilary French, Costly Trade-Offs - reconciling trade and the environment, World Watch Paper No. 133, March 1993.] This is not surprising, for free trade is above all an essential device for promoting further economic development, which it does in particular by promoting the further development of the transnational corporations (TNCs) who already largely control world trade.

Consider that 80 – 90 percent of the trade in tea, coffee, cocoa, cotton, forest products, tobacco, jute, copper, iron-ore and bauxite is at present controlled in the case of each of these commodities by three to six massive transnational corporations. [Environmental Aspects of the Activities of Transnational Corporations: a survey, UN Centre on Transnational Corporations, New York, UN 1985.]

Trade barriers are largely barriers to the further expansion of these vast enterprises. To remove them is to condemn to extinction all the small farmers, artisans, small shopkeepers and small companies in general, whose business they would mercilessly take over. This in itself would greatly increase unemployment. The NAFTA treaty alone, for instance, would drive some 5 to 15 million Mexican peasants off their land and into the labour market in their own country or across the border into the USA. In the USA, NAFTA would give rise to still more unemployment, as US corporations relocate their factories over the border to take advantage, among other things, of incredibly low Mexican wages.

The recent report published by the Finance Committee of the French Senate, under the direction of Senator Arthuis, points out that much of the present unemployment in France is the result of the siting of factories in Third World countries where wages are a fraction of what they are in France and where there is little social protection (a phenomenon known in France as ‘delocalisation’).

Arthuis notes that the French textile industry instead of providing 680,000 jobs as it did 15 years ago, now provides a mere 380,000; and the shoe industry provides only 44,000 jobs instead of 84,000, largely as a result of relocating factories in Third World countries or buying from Third World manufacturers. The signing of the GATT Uruguay Round can only massively accelerate this trend.

As William Pfaff puts it

“We were told that free trade would ‘increase our productivity through investment and technological innovation’. It has proved easier to force wages down and transfer production to low wage countries. Thus the search for competitive efficiency in advanced countries during the 1980s and early 1990s has in practice turned into a competition increating unemployment and lowering labour and welfare standards”. [International Herald Tribune, 7 June 1993.]

What makes this whole situation even more alarming, however, is that the state is becoming ever less capable of meeting the costs of the resulting unemployment. In the UK in 1992, the Government spent £71 billion on social security, one-third of all government spending, while unemployment cost £25 billion in terms of unemployment benefits and foregone tax receipts, costs that can only further increase.

In the EC in the same year the 12 member states spent 125 billion ecu in direct benefits and in training schemes for the unemployed, and at the rate at which unemployment is increasing they do not know how they are going to cope. But unemployment is only part of the problem. A country undergoing economic development must incur all sorts of biological, social and ecological costs – and eventually these must in one way or another be translated into economic costs.

This becomes clear if one considers what economic development really involves. In the pre-development world, ecosystems were largely self-regulating. Traditional man, whether a pastoralist or a farmer, ‘managed’ but a minute proportion of ecological processes. The fertility of the soil, the control of potential pests, the replenishment of water supplies, the prevention of floods, the elimination of wastes, like the regulation of climate itself were, and still are, largely assured by the normal functioning of ecological processes.

However, with development, corporations and state institutions have increasingly sought to ‘manage’ these processes, which among other things means that they have become monetised. In the same way, in pre-development society, man throughout the world, lived largely as a member of an extended familyand a small cohesive community.

Between them, the family and the community were largely self-sufficient – they produced their own food and artefacts, distributed them, brought up and educated their children, looked after the old and the infirm, organised their own religious life, maintained law and order, and in effect governed themselves with little or nointerference from a central authority. What is more, much of the work involved was for free. Parents do not charge for looking after their children, and in much the same way, in a really cohesive community, people will provide services for their neighbours on a relatively non-commercial basis.

Karl Polanyi, the great economic historian, saw the distribution of resources within a traditional community as governed by the principles of “reciprocity” and “redistribution”. In the first case, people for whom services were fulfilled by others were expected to reciprocate. In the second, leading figures were expected to give feasts and otherwise distribute their bounty among fellow villagers.

Commercial transactions in which people sought to maximise the return on some factor of production originally occurred largely with people from outside the community, for the competitive behaviour involved was difficult to reconcile with the co-operative behaviour required between members of the family and the community. Deviant behaviour was rare, it was largely prevented by the force of public opinion, reflecting the traditional values, which seems to be the only effective method of social control we have yet developed.

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