Gaia is the source of all benefits

"Land that is left wholly to nature ... is called, as indeed it is, waste."
  John Locke

"You can gauge a country's wealth, its real wealth, by its tree cover."
  Richard St Barbe Baker

"Wilderness is the bank on which all cheques are drawn."
  John Aspinall

All that great bare belt of country which now stretches south of the Ganges - that vast waste where drought seems to be perennial and famine is as much at home as is Civa in a graveyard - was once an almost impenetrable wood. Luxuriant growth filled it; self-irrigated, it kept the fruit of the summer's rains till winter, while the light winter rains were treasured there in turn till the June monsoon came again. Even as late as the Epic Period, it was a hero's derring-do to wander through that forest-world south of the Nerbudda, which at that time was a great inexhaustible river, its springs conserved by the forest. Now the forest is gone, the hills are bare, the valley is unprotected, and the Nerbudda dries up like a brook, while starved cattle lie down to die on the parched clay that should be a river's bed.
  E. Washburn-Hopkins

It is fundamental to the world-view of modernism that all benefits are man-made - the products of scientific, technological and industrial progress - and made available via the market system. Thus health is seen as something that is dispensed in hospitals, or at least by the medical profession, with the aid of the latest technological devices and pharmaceutical preparations. Education is seen as a commodity that can only be acquired in schools and universities. Law and order, rather than being natural features of human society, are seen instead as provided by our police force in conjunction with the law courts and the prison system.

Even society is seen as man-made, brought into being by the 'social contract'. Not surprisingly, a country's wealth is measured by its per capita Gross National Product (GNP), that provides a rough measure of its ability to provide its citizens with all such man-made commodities, a principle faithfully reflected in modern economics.

For economists trained in these ideas, natural benefits - those provided by the normal workings of ecospheric processes, assuring the stability of our climate, the fertility of our soil, the replenishment of our water supplies, and the integrity and cohesion of our families and communities - are not regarded as benefits at all; indeed, our economists attribute to them no value of any kind. It follows that to be deprived of these non-benefits cannot constitute a 'cost' and the natural systems that provide them can thereby be destroyed with economic impunity.

Even economists who can see through this preposterous accounting system still deny that environmental destruction is a problem, because they have been taught that the market system, in conjunction with science, technology and industry, can deal with any 'resource shortage'.

For instance, the farmers of the San Joaquin valley, in the southern part of the great central valley of California, are faced with a serious water shortage that may put many of them out of business, but they do not seem unduly concerned and are making no effort to adapt highly wasteful water-intensive practices to the new conditions. It is taken for granted that, sooner or later, some massive water diversion scheme will, as in the past, bring them the water they require from some other part of America, or even Canada.

The same argument is used to persuade us that the degradation of our agricultural land is not a problem. For our economists, agricultural land is just another 'resource'. Gale Johnston, a university professor and well-known agricultural economist, insists that natural resources play a relatively minor role in determining the wealth of nations. Emery Castle of Resources for the Future, one of the USA's most influential research organisations, told a meeting on the availability of agricultural land in 1980 that "the loss of agricultural land is not a high-priority national concern". [1]

The agricultural economist Philip Raup tells us that there can be no permanent shortage of agricultural land: to suppose the opposite is an error that stems from wrongly considering the availability of resources in physical rather than economic terms. Indeed, if some land is unsuitable for agriculture this is only a reflection of current market conditions. If the land were really needed, then the necessary science, technology and capital would make it productive.

This aberrant attitude is further rationalised by mainstream scientists who set out to denigrate natural processes systematically. Thus Medawar talks of nature's "own artless improvisations". [2] Lester Ward attacks the inefficiency of nature: "Rivers, instead of flowing straight, and so delivering their water to the sea with minimum expenditure of energy, lazily meander through plains and valleys" He complains of "the redundant fertility" of the organic world: the herring lays ten thousand eggs, of which only two will reach maturity, and a large chestnut tree produces up to a ton of pollen. [3] For Ward, nature's shortcomings are an invitation to man to become nature's engineer and create a paradise on Earth of his own design, whose functioning he can plan and direct in all its detail. [4]

It is a basic principle of the world-view of ecology that real benefits, and hence real wealth, are, on the contrary, derived from the normal functioning of the natural world and of the cosmos itself. Our greatest wealth must be the favourable and stable climate that we have enjoyed for hundreds of millions of years; our forests and savannahs and fertile agricultural lands; our rivers and streams; springs and ground waters; our wetlands and coral reefs; our seas and oceans and the myriad forms of life that inhabit them.

It is usual today to depict our remote ancestors, who lived off this great wealth without pillaging it, as we are doing today, as poor and wretched. They are made out to have suffered from chronic malnutrition, living permanently on the edge of famine. Nothing is further from the truth. The incredible biological wealth of the vast area that is now the United States of America is attested by John Bakeless. In the great plains, where modern agriculture has eliminated most of the original vegetation, and where the top-soil is eroding so fast that much of the land will be reduced to low-grade rangeland within the next 30 years, there were

"prairies teeming with buffalo, in herds that would pass all day without end; lordly moose along the lake shores; deer everywhere. Wild grapes roofed much of the eastern forest; there were wild fruits of many kinds; plentiful fish in every lake or stream; oysters nine inches long - or longer - in great clusters, that some fortunate dwellers on Manhattan simply pulled out of the clear waters before their shelters; lobsters beyond twenty pounds easily caught; wild turkeys in flocks so large their gobbling in the morning might be deafening; passenger pigeons that literally did darken the sky. There were grouse, prairie chicken, ducks of every kind, wild geese so fearless that at times they tried to frighten off approaching hunters." [5]

It is straining one's credulity a little too far to pretend that the dwellers on Manhattan, as it was then, suffered from malnutrition and famine. On the contrary, they were almost certainly considerably better fed than the present inhabitants of that island. In Africa - a continent where famine has now become chronic, and where 27 million people were threatened with starvation in the year 1991 alone - food shortages appear to have been unusual. The anthropologist Richard Lee testifies that Kung Bushmen had an extremely satisfactory diet and rarely suffered food privations. [6] James Woodburn assures us that the same is true of the Hadza, a tribe of hunter-gatherers in Tanzania.

Mungo Park in his Travels in Africa, tells us that the river Gambia abounds with fish and that nature "with a liberal hand" has bestowed on the inhabitants of that area "the blessings of fertility and abundance". [7] Two 18th century French travellers, Poncet and Brevedent, note that in the Gezira area of the Sudan now occupied by eroded cotton fields, there were once "pleasant forests of flowering acacias full of little green parrots" and "fruitful and well cultivated plains" and that it was called 'God's Country' (Belad-Allah) "by reason of the great plenty". [8]

In Kenya, where now an exploding population must be fed from an increasingly degraded environment, food shortages were also uncommon. As B. D. Bowles notes,

European explorers and Arab traders found little difficulty in obtaining food as they travelled through the area. European conquerors actually burned crops standing in the fields and still survived without the importation of food. They extracted a surplus by force and they would have been unable to do this if no surplus had been available. [9]

Bengal, which included modern Bangladesh and is now one of the most overpopulated and impoverished areas on our planet, was once known as 'Golden Bengal'. Francois Bernier in his Travels in the Moghul Empire was particularly impressed by its "richness":

"Egypt has been represented in every age as the finest and most fruitful country ... but the knowledge I have acquired of Bengal, during the two visits paid to that country, inclines me to believe that the pre-eminence ascribed to Egypt is rather due to Bengal." [10]

Nor is there any reason to suppose that the Australian Aborigines were short of food. Sir George Grey, who spent a good deal of time with Australian Aborigines in the early part of the 19th century, insists that he always found the greatest abundance in their huts.

Even if we are forced to admit that malnutrition and famine were not man's natural lot, we still insist that tribal man was poor because he was deprived of material goods and technological devices. This too is an illusion. For perhaps 95 percent of man's tenancy of this planet, he pursued a nomadic way of life as a hunter-gatherer, swidden agriculturalist or nomadic pastoralist. For the nomad, material goods that we associate with wealth are, above all, a burden he sees as "grievously oppressive", the more so the longer they have to be carried around.

When Laurens van der Post wanted to give a present to Bushman friends with whom he had sojourned, as a token of his gratitude for their hospitality, he simply did not know what to give them.

We were humiliated by the realisation of how little there was we could give to the Bushmen. Almost everything seemed likely to make his life more difficult for him, by adding to the litter and weight of their daily round. They themselves have practically no possessions: a loin strap, a skin blanket and a leather satchel. There is nothing that they could not assemble in one minute, wrap up in their baskets and carry on their shoulders for a journey of a thousand miles. They had no sense of possession." [11]

To label them as poor completely misses the point, for Bushmen, living in their natural environment, do not feel in any way deprived by their lack of material goods. Their priorities are simply quite different.

They were even different at the court of the Manchu emperors of China, before that country had been subjected to Western influence. Thus the Emperor Ch'ien Lung was not the least impressed by the gift of manufactured goods presented to him by the British emissaries of King George III who sought to establish diplomatic links with his country. He rejected the British request and sent a letter to King George that concluded with the following words:

Swaying the wide world, I have but one aim in view, namely to maintain a perfect governance and to fulfil the duties of the State. Strange and costly objects do not interest me ... As your Ambassador can see for himself, we possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country's manufactures. [12]

This attitude could not be more foreign to us. Our appetite for material goods and technological devices seems insatiable. Indeed, it is in terms of our access to them that our wealth, indeed our welfare, is normally gauged. It is undoubtedly true that today we need a lot of material goods and technological devices, but this is not because we have an intrinsic need for them but because, in the aberrant conditions in which we live, they are required for the purpose of satisfying our biological, social, spiritual and aesthetic needs-our real needs.

The car, when it was first invented, was undoubtedly a luxury. Slowly, however, it became a necessity: as it came to be assumed that people possessed them, so they were expected to travel ever further to their place of work, to the schools where their children were educated, to shopping centres or for recreational purposes.

It is not religion that is the opiate of the people, as Karl Marx decreed, but materialism. The possession of material goods has only been man's chief preoccupation for a very short time, whereas religion permeated every aspect of the life of vernacular man. Material and technological goods can be regarded as little more than bribes to induce people to accept the systematic annihilation of their real wealth that inevitably accompanies economic development or progress.

It is unlikely that any man-made commodity, however sophisticated, can adequately replace the natural product that it mimics. The reason is that the latter is designed to satisfy the countless requirements of the smaller systems which compose it, as well as those of the larger systems of which it is part - whereas the man-made commodity is only designed to satisfy a few of these requirements.

A good illustration is our attempt, as part of the developmental process, to substitute cow's milk for human milk. Needless to say, it is always easy to find experts, who, on the basis of a simplistic notion of human nutrition, assure us of its superiority. We are assured that cow's milk has a higher protein content, for instance.

But as Ross Hume Hall notes, a calf needs more protein, because at birth it grows more quickly than does a human baby. More important still, as S.H. Katz and M.V. Young point out, is the fact that cow's milk contains less polyunsaturated fat, but this fat is needed for building brain tissue and what is sufficient for this purpose in a growing calf is insufficient for the development of a human baby's much larger brain. [13]

There are a host of other reasons why cow's milk is a poor substitute for human milk. It contains an almost equal ratio of calcium and phosphorus, unsatisfactory for a human baby which requires more calcium. The level of sodium in cow's milk is too high and may give rise to primary hypertension. The low level of copper in cow's milk has been related to the reduced transportation of iron and hence to the iron deficiency associated with anaemia, common among North American infants. On the other hand, human milk contains the proportion of long-chain fatty acids that most favours their absorption and conversion to energy in the human baby.

Furthermore, the gastro-intestinal tract of a baby fed on human milk is colonised by the bacterium Lactobacillis bifidis. The important role played by this bacillus appears to have been grossly underestimated. Its presence appears to be essential to the absorption of protein and other nutrients in the milk.

Equally important is the role played by human milk in ensuring immunisation to disease. Certain antibodies are transmitted by the placenta which is permeable to them, while other antibodies are excluded. This means that bottle-fed babies are born without immunity to the diseases against which the latter provide protection - including those of gastro-enteric origin that happen to be the leading cause of mortality among babies throughout the world. These antibodies, on the other hand, are present in human milk in sufficient concentrations to provide protection against many gastroenteric diseases, though it appears that this immunisation only occurs if the corresponding antigens are present in the child's immediate environment.

There is also growing reason to believe that the intimate relationship between mother and infant during breastfeeding has a significant effect on the child's digestive capacities. Katz and Young also consider that a real synergy is likely to exist among the nutritional, immunological, psychoendocrinological and maternal responses that foster infant development. [14]

It is both naive and irresponsible to suppose that so incredibly sophisticated a natural process as breastfeeding, that has evolved over millions of years, can be advantageously replaced by feeding an infant on milk that is designed by its evolution to satisfy the requirements of a baby ungulate, contained in a bottle that provides but a crude imitation of its mother's teat.

If human milk is one of nature's products that we cannot really do without, so are the natural forests that once covered significant proportions of our planet's land area, in particular the tropical rainforests. One can draw up an almost endless catalogue of the irreplaceable services that rainforests provide.

By means of their elaborate root systems, they literally hold the soil together, preventing erosion from even the steepest slopes. Even in rainforests that are subjected to 300 inches of rain a year, the water that runs off into the rivers is crystal clear. Their elaborate root system also ensures that the Earth beneath it is sponge-like, which maximises its capacity to retain the rains; by the same token, controlling run-off to the rivers, releasing only a fraction of what the Earth retains.

Once the forests have been cut down, and the roots have rotted, the Earth hardens and ceases to be capable of retaining water. Most of the water runs off immediately into the rivers, whose beds have been raised by erosion from increasingly deforested slopes, giving rise to ever-worsening floods. The water table sinks; rivers become torrents that only flow during the rainy season; streams and springs dry up.

Forests also provide the perfect habitat for living things - it is said that between 50 and 80 percent of the tens of millions of different species of living things inhabit the tropical rainforests. Vernacular man, even after he has become a sedentary cultivator, still derives much of his food from neighbouring forests. He also finds there the materials required for his houses or huts, his artefacts and tools, his medicinal herbs and his vegetable dyes - indeed, they provide the very material basis of his cultural pattern, that necessarily disintegrates once the forests go.

Forests also provide an important sink for carbon dioxide and, at the same time, generate the oxygen required for animals to breathe. The wholesale burning of forests that is occurring today is responsible for a significant proportion of the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere to cause global warming. Where the destruction is irreversible, it reduces this sink and reduces too the availability of oxygen.

Forests, via the transpiration from their leaves, give rise to much of the atmospheric moisture that will form into clouds and absorb much of the sun's heat, providing, in this way, a cooling system for the planet. In Amazonia, between 50 and 70 percent of the rain that falls on the three million square kilometres of Amazonian rainforest appears to be generated in this way.

Thus over this vast area huge amounts of water are constantly falling and rising - yet another way in which these forests act as a cooling system for our planet. James Lovelock has sought to calculate the annual energy cost of achieving the same degree of cooling by mechanical means.

If the clouds made by the forests are taken to reduce the heat flux of sunlight received within their canopies by only one percent, then their cooling effect would require a refrigerator with a cooling power of six kilowatts per hectare. The energy needed, assuming complete efficiency and no capital outlay, would cost annually £1,300 per hectare. [15]

On the basis of this calculation, he regards "the refrigeration system that is the whole of Amazonia" as being worth about $150 trillion. This is probably a conservative estimate and values only one of the large number of different services that the forest provides. Cattle ranching on the same low-grade land would yield a total income of less than one 13th of this sum and even then only for a few years, after which this highly vulnerable land would have been largely transformed into dust.

Not surprisingly, even after 150 years of economic development, the vast bulk of the services required to keep our planet functioning are still provided by the self-regulating process of the ecosphere. This was stated quite explicitly by Carroll Wilson in his seminal MIT report Man's Impact on the Global Environment (1967)

"Almost all potential plant pests are controlled naturally. Insects pollinate most vegetables, fruits, berries and flowers. Vegetation reduces floods, prevents soil erosion, air-conditions and beautifies the landscape. Fungi and minute organisms work jointly on plant debris and weathered rock to produce soil. Commercial fish are produced almost entirely in natural ecosystems. Natural ecosystems cycle matter through green plants, animals and decomposers to eliminate wastes. Organisms regulate nitrates, ammonia and methane in the environment. On a geological time scale, life regulates the amount of carbon dioxide, oxygen and nitrogen in the atmosphere." [16]

No more than a minute fraction of these essential self-regulating ecospheric functions, what is more, could be taken over - very inadequately at that - by the externally-regulated technospheric institutions and corporations of our modern world.

Why this must be so is clear if we compare the lot of the Indians of the north-west coast of America before the arrival of the white man with that of an astronaut. The region was once covered with luxuriant temperate rainforests, teeming with game and plentifully supplied with all sorts of wild fruits, berries, herbs and roots. At low tide, so abundant were the shellfish on the beaches that the Tlingit, a local Indian tribe, used to say that "when the tide goes out, the table is laid".

Nor, it would seem, was there any need to build bridges across the rivers, for it was said that you could cross them on the backs of the salmon. All this ecological wealth was made available to the Indians, free, by the self-regulating processes of the ecosphere, in what - barring unforeseen catastrophes such as the arrival of the white man - was a totally sustainable manner.

The lot of the astronaut circling our planet in a small metal box could not be more different. He is deprived of even the most rudimentary ecological wealth. No edible plants grow in his space capsule; there is no game to hunt; no fish to catch; no shellfish to gather from the shores. There are no rivers, no streams, no springs from which he can obtain water to drink. Even the oxygen he breathes has to be brought from afar.

Indeed, the very conditions required for sustaining life in his capsule can only be maintained by the most sophisticated technological devices and the cost of sustaining him in such degraded and artificial conditions is beyond calculation. The richest man in the world could not afford to enjoy his miserable lifestyle for more than a few days, while only the wealthiest nations at the height of their economic fortunes, could afford to provide it to a handful of their subjects and then but for a few days, weeks or at the most, months.

If the US government takes seriously the National Academy of Science's recent publication, Policy Implications of Greenhouse Warming, then we may all be condemned to become astronauts on our own planet. [17] Indeed, if we refuse to cut down global emissions of greenhouse gases by 60-80 percent which the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) regards as necessary to stabilise world climate, the only method available to us for preventing a global climatic disaster may well be to resort to the geo-engineering 'solutions' of the National Academy of Sciences.

Among those suggested by this august body is the placing of "fifty thousand, one hundred square kilometre mirrors in the Earth's orbit, to reflect incoming sunlight". Another is "to use guns or balloons to maintain a dust cloud in the stratosphere to increase the sunlight reflection". Other strategies involve using aircraft "to maintain a cloud of dust in the low stratosphere to reflect sunlight", or decreasing the "efficiency of burning in engines of aircraft and flying in the low stratosphere, to maintain a thin cloud of soot to intercept sunlight".

But how do we know that these ludicrously crude geo-engineering strategies would work? Also, what happens if there is a general strike in the country that is responsible for producing them? Or a civil war? Or a Chernobyl-type accident to a nuclear installation, that leads to the compulsory evacuation of large numbers of people; or simply an economic collapse of the sort that occurred in 1929 and that is more than likely to recur in the next decade?

Even if it does not, how do we know that the world economy would continue to be capable of sustaining the cost of applying these geo-engineering strategies? How do we know that the resources would always be available, or that our planet could sustain the social and ecological costs? Or even that the climatic degradation caused by carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of the fossil fuels required to power so gigantic a geo-engineering enterprise might not neutralise what beneficial climatic effects it might conceivably provide?

That our scientists should even suggest the remote possibility that all this absurd gimmickry could provide a substitute for the homeostatic mechanisms of the ecosphere that have so far regulated world climate, indicates to what extent they live in a world of their own - one that seems to be increasingly insulated against social, ecological and even economic realities.

References