Now when development occurs, functions that had always been fulfilled by families and communities are taken over by ever bigger corporations and state institutions. The implications of this takeover are dramatic. The first and possibly the most important is that the family and the community, increasingly deprived of their functions, must necessarily atrophy and society is correspondingly atomised. The social costs thereby incurred are enormous.
Children who are no longer brought up within the increasingly defunct family and community become emotionally disturbed and largely incapable of being educated, however much money is lavished on educational facilities. They increasingly resort to alcohol and drugs and other means of isolating themselves from a world with which they are ever less capable of coping. They fall prey to mental diseases of different sorts and indulge in an ever-wider range of self-destructive delinquent and criminal activities.
Such are the inevitable consequences of the social deprivation that economic development necessarily gives rise to and whose costs our modern society must necessarily meet in one way or another.
The takeover by corporations and state institutions of the functions previously fulfilled by families and communities have other serious consequences: ever more capital-intensive and incomparably more environmentally destructive technologies come into use. There is also an escalation in the scale on which economic activities are conducted, with a further increase in environmental destruction.
Society must thereby incur ever greater environmental costs which once again must either bemet in the form of money spent on pollution control and other means of limiting the damage or else by an increased incidence of pollution-related diseases, reduced fish catches, and crop yields, etc.
It is now becoming ever more evident that the state can no longer and will be ever less capable of paying the biological, social, ecological and other costs of economic development. Take the case of state pensions. They cost the state £25 billion in 1992 and are expected to cost £28 billion in 1995 – a sum which may be very difficult to find.
But all this money is paid to people who in a pre-development society would be adequately looked after for free by their families, and who would obtain access to the requisite foods and services that the family could not provide in the largely non-monetised economy of the village community.
In the UK 25 percent of children are now born to a single parent family and it is expected that within 10 years, one child out of every two will be brought up outside the conventional family. This atrocious situation, which could not exist in a pre-development society, is an obvious consequence of social disintegration. It costs £3.5 billion a year and 70 supplementary benefits are paid to one-parent families which are ever less able to afford increasingly monetised goods and services.
In addition, invalidity benefits, paid to a socially deprived population that is condemned to living in environmental conditions that are ever less favourable to human health, cost £3 billion in 1988, £6 billion in 1992 and are expected to cost £8 billion in 1998. [Paul Routledge and Polly Ghazi, "Death of the Welfare State", The Observer 25 April 1993.] Not surprisingly, the state can no longer cope.
The welfare state is already being systematically dismantled. Thus free National Health care is no longer available. Charges have increased by four times since 1981. Housing benefits have also been reduced and this can only be the beginning. The situation is similar in most EC countries. EC officials know that Europe can no longer afford its present high level of social benefits. If the GATT Uruguay Round is implemented these will, in any case, have to be drastically reduced to enable EC corporations to compete with those located in countries where labour costs are so much lower.
If the Maastricht Treaty is implemented, social benefits will also have to be drastically reduced. The main preoccupation of those who drew up that treaty is monetary stability, which is seen as requiring that no government borrows more than 3 percent above its GNP. This effectively outlaws the deficit-funding of social programmes – undermining in this way the very basis of social democracy – which is particularly ironic since social democratic parties throughout the EC are promoting the treaty to their respective electorates.
Bradford University economists, Drs. Brian Burkett and Mark Bainbridge consider that EC countries will have to cut expenditure on social programmes by between £20 and £57.5 billion. [Melanie Philips, The Guardian 21 May 1993.] They calculate that in the UK it would mean more than 50,000 fewer National Health service staff between 1994 and 1996, a decrease of about 27,000 teachers a year during the same period, and a huge reduction infamily and unemployment benefits.
We must agree with Dr Ul Haq, who in his Fourth UN Human Development Report admits that our problems are so intractable that we shall have to “rethink society” and accept changes “which are very hard for people to accept”. But what must the rethought-out society look like? It must clearly be one in which there is employment for all, or at least in which each family can earn its livelihood: one in which social problems such as alcoholism and drug addiction, delinquency and crime are reduced to a minimum: in which state expenditure is at a level that it can afford: one too that is sustainable in the sense that the impact of its economic activities on its natural environment is reduced to that which the latter can absorb.
To assure the necessary level of employment means reducing the capital -intensity of employment. Even the EC Commissioners have recently admitted that it cannot be done by economic growth alone but requires “a more employment-intensive pattern of growth in Europe”. [John Carvel, "EC Jobs Plan to Halt Economic Decline", The Guardian 17 May 1993.] Of course they still insist on “growth” but one of the main mechanisms of growth is precisely the move to an ever more capital-intensive economy, so how can it be achieved if we put this mechanism into reverse?
If for instance, our agriculture becomes work-intensive, what happens to the farm-machinery industry and the agro-chemical industry? Clearly too, the move to a more employment-intensive economy would be opposed by many industrial interests but if our society is not to break down under the weight of growing unemployment and other social costs, this opposition must be overcome.
It will also be objected that this move will make our economy less competitive vis-à-vis its rivals – but can we not have an international agreement to reduce the capital-intensity of economic activities? If we cannot, too bad. We can survive with less trade. We have done so in the past, but we cannot cope indefinitely with escalating unemployment.
A second essential means of increasing employment is to diversify our economy. But we cannot do this unless we reject the principle that what we produce and what we import should be determined exclusively by considerations of short-term accountancy. Today, because (at least temporarily) we can buy cheaper coal in Colombia, our coal mines are being irreversibly closed down; because electronic equipment is cheaper in Japan, our electronic industry is sacrificed; because cherries are cheaper in California and apples in France, the cherry and apple orchards of Kent have been grubbed up and the Garden of England is no more.
Once the GATT Uruguay Round has been signed, everything we make in England could well be obtained more cheaply abroad, often in countries where labour costs are but a fraction of what they are here and often by methods of production that are even more environmentally disruptive than those that we make use of ourselves.
Does that mean that we should close down all our factories and farms and buy everything abroad? If so, where would we get the money to buy it with, or with which to pay the massively higher unemployment benefits? What is more, how do we know that Colombian coal, Japanese electronic equipment, Californian cherries and French apples will always be cheaper?
The truth of the matter is that what we produce and what we import cannot be decided by such a crude mechanism as that provided by the interplay of market forces, one that is totally blind to all biological, social, ecological, aesthetic and moral considerations of any sort, and that only responds to the shortest-term economic considerations at that.
Of course, in rejecting ‘comparative advantage’ specialisation, we are further depriving our government and corporations of key instruments for promoting economic growth and again such a policy would be bitterly opposed by many industrial interests. But once more, to avoid social breakdown and in order to create a fulfilling and sustainable society, we have no alternative but to overcome this opposition.
One problem is that by making our economy less capital-intensive by correspondingly diversifying it and by reducing the scale on which the very much increased range of economic activities are conducted we must reduce people’s per capita productivity – and hence their purchasing power. If we were to adopt Ul Haq’s further proposal that we should adopt a three day week, a sort of human ‘set-aside’, their purchasing power would be still further reduced and since the state is likely to be ever less capable of helping, the only solution must be to create conditions in which people can lead a fulfilling life with correspondingly less money.
Such conditions can only occur in a real society – one that is made up of extended families, making up cohesive communities and having access to the appropriate land base. In such conditions, families can produce much of their own food, clothes and artefacts, bring up their children and look after their aged and infirm relatives for free, as they have always done until very recently in the history of human affairs. Most of those goods and services which cannot be provided by the family, can be provided by the community by barter or purchase at a price that is determined more by social factors than by market forces.
The localised economy is probably, for these reasons, the only one in which economic activities can be work-intensive and highly diversified and also provide a satisfying livelihood for all. It is also the only one in which the symptoms of social deprivation are most absent – as can be verified empirically by all those who have visited traditional communities in those areas that have succeeded in remaining largely outside the orbit of the industrial economy.
That this should be so is not surprising, since it is by being brought up within a loving family and cohesive community that a young person’s psychological and social needs are best met, while it is work that is conducted within the family and community economy that has the most meaning to him or her, a meaning that is usually absent from work in a vast anonymous factory belonging to a foreign conglomerate.
It is also in a society made up of such small, largely self-sufficient communities that state intervention is least required and needless to say, it is this type of society whose economic activities; as environmentalists well know, have the smallest environmental impact – the only type of society, for that reason, that is truly sustainable.
Can we create it? Even if our government and leading industrialists do everything they can to avoid doing so, it will create itself. As the state and global economy disintegrate, people will only survive by creating such a society themselves. They are already doing so in just about all sub-Sahara African and South American cities, where without the informal economy with all its obvious defects, the bulk of the people already today would not survive. The informal economy is also developing rapidly in many Asian cities, and increasingly in the Western industrial world.
The question is only whether the transition is to be orderly or chaotic – whether, too, it will occur fast enough to avoid serious social and ecological discontinuities. For it to do so requires enlightened leaders who so far have been conspicuous by their absence but above all it requires great public awareness of the issues involved – for it is only if public pressure on a hitherto unknown scale is applied on our increasingly irresponsible political and industrial leaders that the necessary changes will be brought about.
Discussion
Peter Tomkins: “By far the biggest problem facing us is over-population. Some Governments have taken steps to tackle it. Should we not encourage others to do so? My other point concerns nuclear power. Why is it attacked so much, when it causes much less pollution than fossil fuels?”
Population is a terrifying problem. We’re told that we are going to have 10 billion people on this planet, but Paul Ehrlich, who wrote The Population Bomb, realises that this is never going to occur. There’s nowhere to put them. We have delegated the task of controlling our population to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Disease and famine will solve the problem, though in a very crude way. I personally don’t believe the population of the world will increase much beyond 6 billion. In any case, population is not the only problem.
Some of the worst destruction has been caused in countries with very small populations. Australia is one of the most environmentally devastated areas. The main cause of our problems is economic development. Traditional societies had population control strategies built into their cultural pattern. These patterns have been destroyed and we haven’t found a way of replacing the controls they provided.
We’re told that economic development increases people’s security, reducing the need for so many children, but the opposite seems to be the case. People’s security is being systematically reduced as they are pushed off the land into the slums. I think population growth is itself caused by economic development.
It is generally accepted that nuclear power is totally uneconomic, but for me the important thing is that nuclear power stations are incredibly dangerous. Also, there is no safe way of getting rid of nuclear waste, nor is there any chance that the power stations will be decommissioned. How are we going to find people willing to cut up hundreds of thousands of tons of radioactive concrete? Where are we going to put it all and who’s going to pay for it? Decommissioning power stations costs as much as building them. In the end they will simply be covered with earth and become radioactive mountains, symbols of modern man’s folly and cynicism.
For me, the nuclear industry is not needed and should not be tolerated. It’s perfectly possible to have a sensible programme for generating the energy we require without recourse to coal, oil, or nuclear power. First we need cut down energy consumption. We could do this by about 70 percent without really noticing it.
Amory Lovins has designed a car, for instance, that goes three hundred miles to the gallon. If everybody in the US made use of the long-lasting bulbs that are now on the market, one could apparently close down 25 big power stations. Once our energy consumption has been reduced in this way, the role of renewables would be very much bigger, and energy use could become largely sustainable.
Colette Hill (Managing Director, Colette Hill Associates): “How do you give people the will to implement the solutions you put forward?”
There’s no magic formula. I just think that people will increasingly realise that there is no alternative. In the Third World, people are becoming more and more dependent on the informal economy. In the Ivory Coast, for example, only 7 percent of the population work in the formal economy, and fewer will be required every year, so people have to develop their own informal economy or starve. The situation must move in this direction throughout the world, and I think it will be the same in this country in the not too distant future.
Andrew Weston-Webb (Writer and teacher): “In our sophisticated society individuals are disempowered by the immensity they find themselves in. We no longer have rituals to prove who we are.”
People feel increasingly impotent. Trying to influence the Government is a waste of time. They are not interested in any evidence that demonstrates the futility of their policies. They just get their scientists and economists to discredit it, or alternatively they just bury it. I agree, we have totally deritualised our society and impoverished it by doing so. As a result, we are creating a totally anonymous and alienated society.
Wendy Twist (Programme Manager, Prince of Wales Business Leaders Forum): “Surely a more fundamental issue is not the size of the population but what resources it consumes. The Third World consumes much less per capita than the developed world.”
That’s absolutely correct. It’s very difficult for us to tell them to control their populations when 20 percent of the world’s population in the richest industrial countries consume 80 percent of the world’s resources. We can’t tell them what to do unless we do it ourselves.
Rowan Jackson (Fieldway Ltd (an alternative energy company)): “What is going to change attitudes in the developed world and in the Third World to enable your ideas to come about?”
Tribal people and village people in India are strongly reacting against what they call ‘destructive development’, for which the symbol is the large dam, of which some 1,500 have been built since the war, and which have led to the expulsion of 14 million people from their lands, many of them to the slums. Until their culture has been disrupted by us and they have been exposed to Dallas and Dynasty on the village television set, they don’t necessarily want development at all. What they most want is to preserve their way of life and to avoid being expelled from their land by some development scheme.
I think there is every chance that present attitudes in the west will change. There must be a big reaction against free trade and big corporations. It is already beginning.
The Chairman: “Many major projects in the developed world are being affected by constraints from unecological development. Insurance companies are concerned about paying out huge sums because of increased claims arising from environmental causes such as storms and subsidence from drought. The insurance industry is worth about as much as the fossil fuel industry which didn’t want a climate treaty signed. Turkey, a member of NATO, is damming the Euphrates. Downstream, Iraq and Syria are more than upset because they are going to be deprived of their water. The NATO treaty means that our soldiers could turn out to help Turkey in any spat it has with Iraq and Syria, so Organisations like NATO are starting to think about these things. There are many examples, on a small and a large scale, of people being forced to think differently because of the breakdown Teddy talked about.”
Dupont is very concerned about the possibility of being sued over CFCs. There has been a big increase in skin cancers in the past years, and there could be a very costly class-action against this. The link between asbestos and cancer has caused tremendous problems for the asbestos industry, which was largely insured with Lloyd’s. That’s one of the reasons why Lloyd’s is in trouble today. I agree that the dams on the Euphrates will make life very difficult in Iraq. Big dams in general are being increasingly discredited, and plans to build more of them will encounter ever stiffer opposition. At one time it looked as if Slovakia and Hungary might even go to war over the dam on the Danube.
Dr. David Goode (Director, London Ecology Unit): “We do have one ritual to celebrate achieving adulthood: it’s called the driving test. It seems to me that with an increasing proportion of the population living in urban areas (now 85 percent) there is a danger that a large proportion of the population may consider that humanity can exist in isolation from nature. Do you have any suggestions as to how we might re-establish our links with nature?”
There’s no doubt that the psychological effects of being totally separated from the natural world are very significant. At present we mitigate them by making use of all sorts of gimmicks. Senator Barry Goldwater, we are told, goes to sleep to a record of a waterfall on his ranch, but the only real way of dealing with the problem is to live a more natural life in smaller units.
John Godfrey (European Research into Consumer Affairs): “With the debate on subsidiarity currently going on in the European Community, perhaps the Commission might take on board local initiatives for sustainable development?”
It’s a question of subsidiarity at an economic, not just at a political level. Obviously, aeroplanes aren’t going to be made in villages, but I think that what can be made at a local level should be.
Dee Winbourne (Tropical Rainforest Campaigner, Kensington and Chelsea Friends of the Earth and Green Realignment): “Three years ago I went to a gathering where eminent speakers made me start to think. Perhaps there are a lot of people like me who haven’t ‘thought’ before but would like to get involved with their local environment. I’ve given up my car in London and I now tide everywhere by bike, and I love it. There’s a lot you can do just by making these ideas known.”
Chris Berry (Development Manager): “What chance of success is there for Al Gore, who is arguably the world’s leading green politician?”
Vice President Gore has succeeded in getting a few excellent people appointed to important posts in the administration, such as the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). I’m afraid that I don’t know what his real influence is within the administration. What is clear though is that the administration is having great difficulty in getting environmental measures through Congress. The energy tax, for instance, has been mercilessly watered down to meet the requirements of various interest groups.
Peter Lloyd (Founder of Frontiers): “I believe, there are other organisations with programmes to get ordinary people more environmentally conscious and persuade them to change their ways of living, such as Global Action Plan which is being launched in 1994.”
A member of the audience: “A lot of gloom and doom is spoken, and it’s all very negative. People are waiting for a vision. They’re gradually realising that it need not be like that.”
There’s an incredible amount of convergent thinking about the localised economy, and for me this is a very hopeful sign, nor is it coming only from environmentalists. As Victor Hugo is supposed to have said, ‘there’s nothing as powerful as an idea whose time has come”.
The Chairman: “That’s a good point on which to end. It might be interesting if we tried to get together a group of people to talk to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and help him to green the recovery so that it conserves the human community as well as the environment.”
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