The future of an affluent society - the case of Canada - Part Three

The conserver society

Clearly if Canada is to avoid major discontinuities of a type capable of bringing its economy - and hence its society, which has increasingly become an appendage to it - to its knees, it must make itself less dependent on the use of resources which will become ever less available and increasingly more expensive. Canada, must, in fact, learn to conserve rather than to consume.

Such a policy is all the more necessary if we consider what a massive proportion of world resources is consumed by the industrial nations at the expense of the non-industrial ones. It is possible that it was this consideration which above all prompted the Science Council to recommend in January 1973 that Canada became a conserver society:

"We cannot continue to endorse continental or global resource policies which will contribute only to the disparity between the rich nations and the poor. A small number of nations now consume a large proportion of the earth's resources. Within this global context, the Science Council recommends that Canadians as individuals, and their governments, institutions and industries begin the transition from a consumer society, preoccupied with resource exploitation to a conserver society engaged in more constructive endeavours. Ideally, Canada could provide the leadership necessary to work toward more equitable distribution of the benefits of natural resources to all mankind." [134]

This is indeed an historical decision, one that has given Canada a considerable lead over other industrial countries, in the task which all will soon have to undertake, that of adapting for the new era that dawns before us.

The establishment of the Advanced Concepts Centre at Environment Canada * (This body has now been merged with the Science Adviser's office at Environment Canada) is a further step in this direction. This body is free to study all the possible implications of the conserver society.

Yet a further step has been taken with the appointment of a team under Professor Cimon Velaskakis, whose members are drawn from McGill and Montreal Universities to study the details of a plan for the establishment of a conserver society for Canada - the Gamma Project.

It is undoubtedly the case that a very considerable saving in energy and resources can be achieved without radically altering lifestyles; even in Canada, where the climate is particularly cold and where as a result the high level of energy consumption simply for heating purposes is often regarded as essential. However Wood points out that the Swedes with a similar climate to the Canadian one also enjoy a very high standard of living yet their per capita consumption of energy is only 60 percent of that of the Canadian people. [135]

The potential for energy saving is also greater than most people think in the case of housing. In this field, techniques for energy saving as McCallum [136] points out, include minimising surface area to reduce heat loss, building houses of local materials to avoid transport costs and the use of energy intensive materials, orientating the house in an east-west direction and on a south slope in the northern hemisphere, putting windows on the south side only, building a greenhouse on the south side to trap the heat, planting deciduous trees around the house to regulate temperature, and using conifers as windbreaks, since wind-speed is related to heat loss.

It is probable that the most effective of all these measures is to ensure careful insulation. [137] It is considered that in Scandinavia, if one has $1,000 to spend on heating a house, $900 should be spent on insulation. In the UK, it has been estimated that it would suffice to double insulation standards in the home in order to reduce the energy used for heating by 50 percent. [138]

The potential for reducing energy and resources used in industry is even greater. Thus, Wood (139) refers to studies in the USA by Makhijni and others at the University of California, which estimate that if the automobile industry used recycled materials and made smaller cars (2,000 lbs instead of 3,000 lbs) the saving in energy by the year 2000 would be equal to the output of 9 large nuclear power stations. [140] In general, recycling offers a great potential as according to Wood,

"the energy required to extract and process virgin materials is in almost every case very much greater than that needed to recycle discarded materials. For example, making aluminium from bauxite requires approx. 55,000 kWh/ton while recycling discarded aluminium to the same state requires less than 5 percent of that - between 1,300 and 2,000 kwh/ton." [141]

The idea that such a programme would reduce employment in the period in which the unemployment level is already very high is without basis. Considerable employment would be provided by manufacturing and installing the new technological infrastructure for a decentralised low energy society. For instance Wood reports that Senator Hart's calculation

"that if one-fifth of ground traffic were shifted to public transport, 1.5 million new jobs would be created by 1985, including 51,000 in the construction industry, 134,000 in repairing road beds and electrifying lines, and 450,000 manufacturing for which an estimated 225,000 workers annually could be drawn from the ranks of unemployed auto workers." [142]

However, it is undoubtedly true that as this programme got under way and the capital intensiveness of employment were systematically reduced, the material standard of living would fall, as indeed it must do if the QOL is to increase.

In any case it will soon be realised throughout the world, that the provision of jobs at the present level of capital intensiveness will no longer be possible on anything like the scale required. It will, in fact, only be by reducing the capital intensiveness of employment and thereby the cost of providing a job that there could be any hope of reducing unemployment. [143]

What reduction in the use of energy and resources is possible without radically affecting the Canadian lifestyles and at what rate can it be achieved? According to Amyot, an economy of 10 to 20 percent is possible by 1985. By the year 2000 he considers that this could be increased by 15 to 30 percent. He suggests that it would be more realistic to aim for a 15 percent reduction by 1980 and a 25 percent one by the beginning of the next century. [144]

My personal feeling, based on conversations with MacKillop and others, is that a saving of between 40 and 50 percent could, in fact, be achieved without bringing about a transformation of the Canadian way of life.

However, even if such a programme were achieved, the Canadian economy would still be dependent on non-renewable resources, and economic activity would still be of a nature capable of causing continued and ever less tolerable biological, social and ecological disruption.

For this reason, as McCallum writes,

"we must gradually move through a period of mixed renewable and non-renewable energy usage to a future period in which renewable sources of energy supply all our energy needs. It is only in this way that we can achieve a healthy relationship between human beings and the environment and also solve the problem of resource depletion." [145]

The advantage of renewable resources, apart from their renew-ability and hence their sustain-ability, is that their use gives rise to the minimum number of problems - or externalities. Wind-power and solar energy do not cause pollution. Wood burning has fewer detrimental effects than coal burning. As McCallum points out: it does not give rise to SO2 pollution and the wood ashes unlike coal ashes can be directly recycled and used as fertiliser. [146]

What would be the implications of this from the energetic point of view? In Canada 45 percent of the energy used comes from oil, 20 percent from gas, 10 percent from coal, 1 percent from nuclear generators, 1 percent from wood, and 23 percent from hydro power. [147] Broadly speaking about 25 percent of the energy used in Canada is from renewable resources, but this is very much higher than in most other countries. It must also be remembered that the potential for increasing energy from wood is very considerable in Canada as are the possibilities offered by wind and solar energy.

These have been looked into very carefully by specialist consultants to the Advanced Concepts Center and one need not go into the details here. What is essential to rea1ise, however, is that even in Canada the exploitation of renewable energy resources alone would not suffice to assure the maintenance, let alone the continued growth of an industrial society of the type we have known in the last decades.

To begin with it would be limited by the availability and cost of resources required for the appropriate installations. Chapman (148) has done some of the basic calculations for the UK. He writes:

"to convert all 18 million houses to solar heating requires some 3.25 million tons of aluminium. Even allowing the conversion to be spread over a long period produces problems. At the peak of the conversion programme, corresponding to 700,000 houses per year, the material demands would use up half the UK produced aluminium, almost three quarters of the UK sheet-glass production and more than twice the UK copper production."

The ecological society

The implementation of a programme to achieve a real conserver society should be the Canadian Government's top priority and in view of the high degree of awareness of the problems involved among top Canadian civil servants both at a Federal and at a Provincial level, this should not be too daunting a challenge. But would this be enough? Would this enable Canada to achieve a sustainable society? The answer is unfortunately no, as should be clear to any reader of this report.

Even after all the apparent wastage in the Canadian economy has been removed, and after all possible technological expedients have been exploited within the framework of a conserver society, the Canadian people's consumption of non-renewable resources and, in general, their impact on their natural environment will remain very considerably higher than can be sustained for more than a generation or so.

This would be so even if a regime of zero-population and zero-economic growth be achieved, for this impact is cumulative (over and above the rate of natural biospheric recovery). It is not just further demographic and economic growth that is intolerable, but the maintenance of the present impact of human activities on the Canadian natural environment. In other words, it is not zero growth, but negative growth, that must be achieved. It may be argued that the Canadian economy is heading in that direction in any case. However, it must be realised that economic contraction would be a very different thing, on the one hand, in a society that has been specifically organised to negotiate it as smoothly as possible, and on the other, in one that has remained geared to the ever less achievable objective of economic growth.

For negative growth to be possible without causing socio-economic discontinuities, it must involve a planned change in lifestyles.

The goal of the second phase of our programme, that which will lead us to an ecological society, is thus very different from the goal of our first phase, which gave rise to a conserver society. If the goal of the latter is to conserve resources so that present lifestyles might be sustained as long as possible, that of the former is, on the contrary, to change lifestyles so as to reduce the need for these resources.

There are two reasons why an ecological society cannot be brought about immediately. The first is that the principles that underlie it are incompatible with current values and with modern science, which faithfully reflects them. The second is that the physical infrastructure of our highly urbanised industrial society is totally unsuitable for a de-urbanised and largely de-industrialised ecological society.

It must follow that during the conserver society phase, a determined effort must be made to modify our current values and reformulate the knowledge taught in our schools and universities so that they may provide the rationale for the policies Canada must embark upon to ensure its survival, while at the same time, the foundations of the physical infrastructure of an ecological society must be laid.

It is probably the former task that is the most daunting problem, and it is worth examining some of its implications.

The ecological approach

If we were persuaded to embark on the adventure of economic growth on such a scale and with such enthusiasm, it was that we were imbued with a view of the world which led us to regard it as the only means of achieving our own welfare as well as that of mankind in general. The history we learned at school was viewed as a linear process from our original state of barbarity to one of civilization, from being the slaves of nature at the mercy of its every caprice, to becoming its masters, subject only to laws of our own making.

The economics we were taught assumed that the benefits available to us were of a material nature: it attributed no value whatsoever to non-material benefits, those that satisfied the needs of our ancestors for millions of years before the coming of industry - clean air, sweet water, fresh foods, beautiful landscapes, wild animals, a festive and convivial life - which means that it was possible systematically to suppress them without incurring any costs.

Our sociology, rather than see a human society as a self-regulating natural system governed by the same basic laws to which all natural systems are subjected, as has been true of well over 90 percent of all the societies developed by man - has seen it as a heterogeneous mass of people who happen to live in the same area and be governed by the same institutions.

In this way, mass society, of today, instead of being regarded as the cancerous aberration that it is, has come to be regarded as the norm, its obvious failings being attributed to technical deficiencies in the institutions that control it.

In such conditions we have no alternative but to rewrite economics, history, sociology, and all other disciplines which are implicitly based on the world view of industrialism. The knowledge imparted in our schools and universities would then come to provide a rationale for the programme of change which must undoubtedly be adopted and which could not be justified on the basis of academic knowledge as it is organised at present.

A new economics would concentrate on measuring real costs and benefits as opposed to immediate economic ones. The goal of government would then be to maximise real benefits and minimise real costs. This would be perfectly achievable economically, since it would mean reducing both immediate economic benefits and costs.

Already, attitudes on this subject are changing very fast indeed. The quality of life in the working place, for instance, is becoming of much greater concern. The simple expedient of paying people more money is likely to prove even less sufficient to induce them to work in uranium mines, steel works, nuclear power stations or vast urban factories. They will want a more meaningful existence, and to do work which is more relevant to their welfare and survival - as was that of our ancestors who lived by hunting and gathering, or those who lived by subsistence agriculture, or plied some self-fulfilling craft within the socially satisfying environment provided by the traditional family and small community.

As is pointed out in Environment Canada's Perspective on the Next Decade,

"What does seem likely is that the period ahead will witness mounting resistance to mechanistic work carried on in environments not conducive to current perceptions of human dignity and personal fulfilment." [149]

And again,

"Many people are no longer prepared to accept unquestioningly or to live within the distinctions which economists and others have traditionally made between work and leisure -that work is socially useful but often personally distasteful while leisure is personally satisfying but often socially unproductive." [150]

A new view of costs and benefits

Already it is being realised by many influential people in Canada, that in many cases, the most important costs and benefits to be taken into account in determining the advisability of any given action are ‘external' to the economic system as seen by modern economists.

As is pointed out in the Final Report of the Prince Edward Island Royal Commission on Land Ownership and Land Use, this is almost certainly the case with forestry which often comes out badly in a conventional cost-benefit analysis. The authors write:

"It may be, in fact, that the productive benefits of proper use of forest soils is more largely in externalities than in the forest crop itself. Consider the water storage function of forests in municipal watersheds. Or the function of forestry in preventing floods and controlling soil erosion through control of rapid run-off. Or the effects of the forest in sheltering of houses and fields from the winds. What are the costs of alternative methods of water storage, run-off control, soil protection, and wind shelters? What are the costs of recovering healthy stability in the landscape when forests have been destroyed? We cheat the forests if we accept cost-benefit analyses that fail to calculate these costs for they are enormous." [151]

As Pollution Probe put it,

"The time has come to begin performing broader cost-benefit analyses which take these ‘hidden' costs into account and to arrive at more meaningful and equitable decisions." [152]

They illustrate this point by examining what would be the cost of the increased air pollution that would be caused if Ontario Hydros' application for increased power export in October 1973 were to be accepted. When this is taken into account, they calculate that

"the cost of the increased power export will far outweigh projected benefits." [153]

As is noted too, in A Perspective on the Next Decade for Environment Canada, a transport policy based on a cost-benefit analysis which took into account real costs and benefits would heavily favour rail transport as opposed to airways. Railways, this report points out, "the least environmentally damaging form of mass transport", are subsidised to perhaps 25 percent of cost. In contrast, airline travel, which is highly energy intensive and exhibits gross local, environmental disruption because major airports must of necessity be in areas of intensive competing land use, is highly subsidised with the traveller paying less than one quarter of the cost of airport construction, navigation aids, weather service and so on. [154]

Among other things, on the basis of such calculations, the Canadian Government could have avoided the error of allowing the development of many small towns that depended for their sustenance on the exploitation of non-renewable resources, or one that could not renew itself fast enough for commercial purposes. This has inevitably led to social and consequently economic problems, involving the resettlement of the inhabitants, and the abandonment of valuable installations whose cost is unlikely to have been amortised in the accounts of the enterprises involved.

According to Dixon Thompson, this has happened with asbestos in the Yukon, copper in North Central BC, and with many small towns such as Elliott Lake, Ontario (uranium) Ocean Falls, BC, and Temiscaming, Quebec (pulp and paper), Sheridon, Lynn Lake, Manitoba (nickel) etc. [155]

It is suggested by Storrs McCall, consultant to Environment Canada, that the key concept is quality of life (QOL). It is by seeking to maximise whatever quantity is used to measure it, that Governments can best serve the interests of their electors. This, he illustrates with reference to the case of the resettlement of the inhabitants of the Newfoundland outports. [156]

According to current notions of human welfare, these people were poor and miserable - for in the remote coves they inhabited, the full benefits of modern materialist civilisation could not be brought to them, and in terms of the world view with which we are imbued, life without automobiles, deep freezes, colour television sets, electric toothbrushes, etc. must by necessity be miserable and unfulfilling.

Secondly, even to meet what were estimated as the basic needs of modern living, the inhabitants had to be heavily subsidized by the state to the extent of at least half their total income. Thirdly, the more recently developed offshore fisheries were, with the aid of modem methods and equipment, very much more efficient.

In view of all this, Cope advised that inshore fishing must stop, the fishermen put on full-time relief, and most of them moved to larger conurbations. This was indeed the right conclusion to come to, if one applied the criteria provided by modern economics. Needless to say, however, they are irrelevant.

Life in the outports may have been hard, but it was satisfying. [157] People lived in a sound physical and social environment - resembling very closely that to which man has been adapted by his evolution. It thereby satisfied basic needs far better than living on relief in an urban wilderness conceivably can, regardless of the comforts and conveniences provided.

What is more, to force people to live exclusively on welfare is to do them the most terrible psychological damage, for it must deprive them of their goal structure, of that social environment that is normally provided by the place of work - of their status within it - of their very identity, pride and self-esteem. This represents a massive human cost - for which the provision of material goods and institutional services offers little compensation. Indeed, it is difficult to find an example of welfare solving any social problem. Wherever we find people living exclusively on relief, we also find crime, delinquency, alcoholism and other forms of retreatism. Indeed, they must go hand in hand.

McCall considers that,

"if the Government were interested in maximising not savings in the provision of public services but QOL, they would in many instances have adopted exactly the opposite policy, namely that of providing ‘stay options' to make it economically and socially feasible for the outporters to remain where they were." [158]

What is more, the capital-intensive offshore fisheries that we regard as ‘economic' are exploitative, and can only lead to the depletion of fish stocks. Indeed, everything is to be gained by reducing catches well below the levels judged as ‘economic'.

As McCall writes, "a reduction of effort below the current sustainable yield level should result in future years in an increase in stock, and hence in increased catches for the same effort." It should also permit better inshore catches. "The right level of catches for outshore fishing is that which will not prevent the destruction of inshore fisheries. These cannot deplete stocks as only a certain percentage of adult cod come inshore to feed on capelin during the summer months."

In fact, a fishing policy based on a cost-benefit analysis that took into account real costs and benefits would lead to a reversal of the present one. As McCall writes:

"Since fishing inshore is less energy-intensive and less capital-intensive than fishing offshore, and in addition employs more fishermen, it would seem that support of the inshore fishery would accord with general policies aimed at energy conservation, self-sufficiency and maximum utilisation of Canada's human resources." [159]

McCall has shown that, in the case he has examined, it would be socially and ecologically advantageous, and hence in the long run economically advantageous, to adopt a course of action which is diametrically opposite to that which would be regarded as economic in terms of modern economic theory. We have seen that this is probably also true of forestry on Prince Edward Island and of power generation in Ontario. Are these isolated cases or simply particularly illustrative examples of a principle with a more general application?

Is it not conceivable that it might equally apply to many other economic activities necessary for the maintenance of our industrial society? Many of them if subjected to a realistic cost-benefit analysis, might even prove contrary to the interests of society, and hence, in the long term, uneconomic. In fact, is it not possible that economic growth itself at least beyond a certain point, might be, in the long run, uneconomic? Undoubtedly, if all the biological, social and ecological costs, and hence, the long-term economic costs, were taken into account our cost benefit analysis of economic growth would look very different.

Benefits

We have so far re-examined the notion of costs.

At this point, we must also examine that of benefits. It has been intimated that many of the benefits provided by our modern society have been considerably overrated in comparison with the basic benefits provided free by the normal functioning of the natural systems that make up the biosphere; and whose disruption gives rise to real costs. Let us, however, look at the notion a little more closely.

The relationship between costs and benefits is clearly a very intimate one, since something can only be regarded as constituting a cost to the extent that it deprives one of a benefit. Thus our present interpretation of costs implies a corresponding interpretation of ‘benefits'. It implies in fact that benefits are also short term economic benefits - benefits in fact that can be bought, which largely means consumer goods, capital equipment and institutional services. Thus in the same way that what we regard as costs does not take into account biospheric costs - costs caused by the disruption of the biological, social and ecological systems that make up the biosphere - what we regard as ‘benefits' does not take into account the free benefits that these provide.

Thus cutting down forests involves, in the long run, incurring costs only because it means depriving us of the great benefits they provide - and which we unfortunately just take for granted.

Similarly, building power stations means incurring unexpected costs - those that deprive us of the fresh unpolluted air whose general availability has been a necessary feature of the environment in which our species has evolved.

In the same way, building a town to exploit a short term resource means incurring costs because it deprives the settlers of the stable employment that they may have benefited from elsewhere and would undoubtedly have benefited from, if they had been involved in subsistence agriculture, or the hunting and gathering way of life of primitive societies - such as the Aleuts and Eskimos, based on the exploitation of totally renewable resources and hence indefinitely sustainable.

Breaking up the small communities of the outports of Newfoundland in order to settle their inhabitants in large conurbations, involved incurring unexpected costs because it deprived them of the quality of life that they previously enjoyed.

Up till now, discussions of this concept have tended to be vague. To look at it in a more precise way, however, means facing a principle which runs so contrary to everything we have been taught that it has rarely been put forward - for fear of ridicule, if nothing else. It is a principle which inevitably follows, however, from another - which no-one on the other hand would care to question - that of the adaptiveness of the evolutionary process which has given rise to the biosphere of which we are a part.

As Boyden constantly points out, if evolution is an adaptive process, then the environment it has provided us with is the one to which we are best adapted [160] - which is the same thing as saying that it is that which best satisfies our needs. However unlikely this might seem in terms of the world view of industrialism, it is this environment which should in theory provide us with the highest possible quality of life (QOL).

If we accept this principle, and it is difficult to see how one can objectively refrain from doing so, then one is led to reject the very notion of ‘progress' which is so basic to the world view of industrialism, for industrialism is justified only on the assumption that the world we have inherited is imperfect and that by means of science, technology and industry, it is possible to improve it.

Indeed, man's real needs, like those of any other form of life, developed during the course of his evolution. I refer to his biological need for sleep, exercise, fresh and varied diet, sweet water, uncontaminated air; his need for the aesthetic satisfactions provide by nature when left undisturbed, his need to fulfil his genetically and culturally determined functions within his family and community.

I refer also to his need to feel all those varied sensations that are derived from the vicissitudes of everyday living - laughing, crying, loving, hating, braving, fearing, revelling in triumphs and self-indulgence but also suffering humiliations and deprivations.

The nature of the entertainments that we most relish should make this clear. If we enjoy a comedy, it is that comedy is a vital part of life - and to laugh satisfies a very basic need. If we enjoy a tragedy or a thriller, it is because we also need to weep, to fear and to suffer.

To force man to spend his days doing dreary and monotonous work in vast factories, to return at night to the ‘controlled environment' of his box-like lodgings where every known domestic appliance and institutional service serve to insulate him against situations that could elicit such responses and otherwise satisfy his basic needs, is to deprive his life of any meaning; to transform him into a passionless robot that functions rather than lives - an insensate component of the doomsday machine that is fast grinding up his real environment and, with it, any remaining chance of a real life.

Boyden points out that the modifications we thereby bring about to the biosphere must cause it to diverge ever more radically from that to which our evolution has adapted us, and that this must give rise to biological maladjustments of which the diseases of civilisation - cancer, ischaemic heart disease, etc. - are but the symptoms. [161]

The argument can be generalised. Such maladjustments do not occur exclusively at a biological level, but at other levels as well. For example, epidemics of infectious diseases affecting plants and animals including man, can best be regarded as the symptoms of ecological maladjustment and that constellation of aberrant behavioural traits that we find in large modern conurbations - crime, vandalism, drug-addiction, etc. - can also be regarded as the symptoms of social maladjustment. [162]

If this is so, then quality of life (QOL] is highest among the most primitive of people hunter-gatherers and slash-and-burn agriculturalists precisely those whom we have been taught to regard as the poorest and most miserable of men.

These societies lived within their biospheric means, in that they did not consume their capital or biospheric resources, but rather lived off its interest. In this way, they caused no biospheric deterioration. Their societies could co-exist with climax ecosystems - which means that from the ecological point of view, they constituted climax ecosystems. [163]

Stability is another word for continuity - indeed such societies could last indefinitely, just like the ecosystems of which they were part. Only geophysical changes, like the ice age, could have destroyed them, or ecological invasions, such as the penetration of the Europeans into those favoured areas where, until recently, they still survived. [164]

If these societies were ideal from the strictly ecological point of view, they were ideal too, from the social one. Family and community life were well developed, and judging by the very low incidence of the symptoms of social deprivation, crime, delinquency, drug addiction, suicide etc. (that is, over and above the levels built into their cultural pattern), they provided their members with a very satisfactory social environment.

What is more, warfare tended to be highly ritualised and led to few deaths. [165] If a community were rent by factionalism it would simply break up to form two communities instead. Fission was a highly effective means of solving such problems. It still is - but today there are institutional impediments to prevent it from occurring (as in Northern Ireland, the Lebanon, Angola, etc.) and also population pressures to make it more difficult. The attachment of hunter-gatherers to their territory (within which they were nomadic) prevented them from indulging in any imperialistic designs on their neighbours. Wars simply took the form of short raids - after which things would rapidly fall back into place.

Such problems as homelessness [166] and unemployment [167] of course, did not exist. Shelters were simple and temporary. Everybody knew how to build them, and the building materials were never lacking. As for unemployment, this there could not be, for there was no employment. Nor strictly speaking was there such a thing as work. The men would hunt, for which privilege people today are willing to pay a very high price indeed. Women would gather berries and roots. (Gathering, it might be noted, is still a favourite pastime of most members of the female sex, though today it is conducted in supermarkets and shopping centres rather than in the open bush).

Nor, among primitive agriculturalists did tending to the family garden and building the slightly more permanent shelters really constitute ‘work'. Such activities were just part of everyday living - indistinguishable from other activities, which we might prefer to regard as leisure. This is evidenced by the lack of a word for work in the language of such societies. It is also reflected in the resistance often displayed by their members to working in mines and plantations set up by colonialist enterprises - which has often forced the latter to import labour from areas where such attitudes have already been dispelled by social disintegration.

It also seems that it was this way of life that best satisfied man's biological needs. They enjoyed a varied diet of fresh uncontaminated foods - and the more we learn of the culturally-determined diets of primitive people, the more we realise how balanced they were, and how well they tended to satisfy their nutritional requirements in the environmental conditions in which they happened to live. [168]

They had ample access to fresh unpolluted water -an increasingly rare commodity today. They had plenty of exercise, and also of sleep, and perhaps most surprisingly of all for people reared on the technological ethic; they were largely exempt from the major infectious diseases of large settled populations - such as smallpox and tuberculosis.

The small nomadic groups in which they lived did not, in fact, provide a niche capable of supporting viable populations of the micro-organisms that transmit them. [169] It appears that a population of 500,000 is the minimum that can support the virus that causes measles, for instance. [170] Nor would they have suffered from poliomyelitis and yellow fever, specifically the diseases of hygiene - against which, even today, the people in the rural areas of the Third World obtain immunisation in early infancy being in closer contact with dirt and excrement.

As for the diseases of civilisation - cancer, ischaemic heart disease, diabetes, diverticulitis, varicose veins, peptic ulcer, appendicitis, and tooth caries - it goes without saying that their incidence, as evidenced by numerous studies of surviving primitive societies, was negligible. [171]

Nor is it likely that their life was boring and unfulfilling as some may suppose. Their knowledge of plants and animals among whom they lived was extensive, as was the vocabulary which they used to describe their relationship with the world around them. The Hadza, the most primitive people of Tanzania, had, according to Woodburn, a vocabulary of 12,000 words in contrast to the 400 used by the average delinquent of New York. [172]

Unfortunately, the sheer mention of primitive people tends to elicit the reaction that we are no longer primitive peoples and that their experience can be of no relevance to our particular predicament. This is yet another example of our highly culture-bound approach to our problems. As already mentioned, perhaps 95 percent of all the people who have ever lived were hunter-gatherers. To postulate uncritically that the experience of 95 percent of humanity is irrelevant to the understanding of the problems of the other 5 percent is an act of extraordinary presumption that is based on no valid theoretical considerations of any kind.

Indeed, our condition has changed, but we have not changed the basic laws of biological, social and ecological behaviour to which we, like all other forms of life, are submitted. Neither our science, our technology, nor our industry can repeal the law of thermodynamics, nor can it repeal the other basic principles governing the behaviour of our biosphere.

The changes we have made have not demonstrated our ability to change these laws but only our ability to violate them with apparent impunity over a very short period of time. How apparent is this impunity is now being demonstrated by the fact that in all sorts of ways we are beginning to pay the consequences of our presumption.

There is a great deal we can learn from the experience of our hunter-gatherer ancestors - notably we can try to determine what features of their way of life made the greatest contribution to the stability of the society they lived in, and having determined this, we can attempt to introduce these features, indeed in a very modified fashion, into our own life styles permitting us thereby to increase accordingly the stability of our own society.

This is also the conclusion reached by Valerius Geist of Calgary University. [173] He points out that the most successful human settlements are precisely those that cater for the needs of ‘natural man'. Studies have revealed that it is precisely in settlements which accommodate natural man's need to live in discreet family units linked together to form small communities, rather than one which simply lumps them all together in vast blocks to form an anonymous mass, that the incidence of crime and other aberrations is at its lowest.

In general the first and most obvious feature of the life of hunter-gatherers was the insignificant role played in them by material goods, technological devices and institutional services. This would lead one to suppose that such things do not actually satisfy basic needs. Life is possible without them, and it appears a very satisfactory one indeed - one in fact, that it is suggested in this report maximises the quality of life (QOL).

From such considerations, it would appear that the quantity and nature of material goods, etc, that we require, rather than be constant among human societies, is very much a function of the sort of life they lead. It seems reasonable to suppose that this is because in different conditions different quantities of material goods, etc. are required for the satisfaction of real, i.e. biological and social needs.

Thus, a people living in a society on the edge of a lake which earns its living by fishing will have need for boats and nets not per se, but because boats and nets in these particular conditions are required to satisfy basic biological needs. Also, so as to carry out rituals and ceremonies associated with the particular cultural pattern which evolved as a means of holding together their society and controlling its relationship with its environment; certain animals must be sacrificed, certain foods eaten and certain clothes worn, and so there is a need for those commodities again not per se but because in the specific conditions involved they are necessary for the satisfaction of basic social needs.

It is in this light that we must regard the material goods and institutional services which our industrial society provides. We do not need an army of motorcars, washing machines and electric toothbrushes, nor massive state institutions dispensing welfare of all sorts, looking after the sick, the young, the old, intruding into almost every aspect of our lives, per se. We need them because in the particular circumstances in which we live, they are necessary to satisfy biological and social needs.

If people live ten miles away from their work and there is little public transport, then clearly they need a motorcar. If in a family, made up of the father, the mother and two children, both parents go out to work and both children spend their day at school, a lot of domestic appliances are required so that the cooking and cleaning can be done in the very short space of time that must in these conditions, be allocated to these tasks. If children are brutalised or abandoned by their parents and left helpless in an urban wilderness, in which they have no relatives and no real friends, the state welfare system is clearly required to look after them.

It is important however, to realise that this is a very abnormal and very aberrant situation, one which would not conceivably occur in the sort of society in which man has lived until very recently. This being so, it would appear that all that industrialisation appears to have accomplished is to have increased the quantity of material goods, and hence the cost, of satisfying real needs - a cost, what is more, that we can ever less afford. A society's GNP, in other words, cannot be regarded as a measure of the real benefits available to it - but merely of the cost of providing these benefits. A society's GNP could, in fact just as well be regarded as its GNC - gross national cost.

This principle is less apparent, in the euphoric stage of development, when a high proportion of GNP is made up of luxuries, which, it would seem, a society could not do without - the automobile when it first appeared, for instance. Unfortunately, however, as development proceeds, luxuries tend to become necessities.

Thus, life changes to accommodate the automobile. People start living further from their place of work; shopping centres appear away from city centres; alternative means of transport are progressively phased out - and finally the automobile has become a necessity - just as, in the same way, have the various institutional services which the welfare state provides - and to which a society becomes increasingly addicted. As - in order to combat the ever less tolerable side-effects of development - these services come to make up an ever greater proportion of GNP, it becomes correspondingly more apparent that GNP and GNC are but two different ways of looking at the same thing.

However, the GNC referred to is not real GNC, i.e. that which takes into account the biological, social, and ecological costs incurred, and hence long term economic costs, but only short term economic GNC. Since the former is much greater than the latter - since, in fact, the ever-increasing real costs of our activities are becoming reflected in ever higher short term economic costs - GNC and hence GNP must correspondingly increase simply in order to meet these costs - and prevent social and ecological collapse. This means of course, incurring still more real costs, and hence further expanding the economy. In this way industrial society is caught up on a positive feedback course towards ever further expansion.

This is a principle which, unfortunately, our most illustrious economists have, failed to understand. Indeed Keynes agreed with John Stuart Mill that eventually our economy would have to stop expanding - to achieve a steady state - so that we could devote ourselves to more elevating pursuits than just earning money. He did not realise that this was impossible without correspondingly modifying society so as to reduce its needs for material goods.

Samuelson wrote in a recent edition of Economics that an investment of $12 billion would suffice to eliminate poverty in the USA. [174] The Office of Economic Opportunities (OEO) spent more than that in three years with no effect on poverty levels whatsoever. The reason, of course, is that poverty in the US, as we have seen, is largely due to social deprivation. In reality, the situation is still worse than this. To provide material and institutional benefits must lead to the further disruption of biological, social and ecological systems which, as a result, become ever less capable of satisfying man's basic need for the benefits that they normally provide.

In other words, by providing compensations for basic biospheric benefits, industrialisation, by the same token, renders these benefits ever less available thereby creating a demand for further material and institutional compensations. Thus, state welfare is only necessary when the family and small community that once provided it have been disrupted - to which disruption it must contribute, directly, by usurping its functions, and indirectly, by favouring further economic growth.

What is more, no-one can seriously suggest that welfare dispensed grudgingly by an anonymous civil servant in some distant capital is a satisfactory compensation for that once lovingly provided by the extended family.

In the same way, the police, law courts, prisons etc. are but institutional compensations for that extraordinarily effective instrument of social control that in a traditional society, is provided by the normal operations of public opinion.

In the same way too, the domestic appliances and convenience foods whose availability we prize so highly would have been quite superfluous in a traditional household, where grandmothers, aunts and little children were available to fulfil all the household chores. It is the disintegration of the family that their general availability helps to foster, that has rendered these devices so necessary.

In fact, the more one looks into it, the more it becomes apparent that our economists' notion of ‘benefits' is no more satisfactory than is their notion of ‘costs'. This further confirms the view expressed in this report that today's economic criteria are of no value for determining public policy. They are justifiable only in terms of that very misguided world-view according to which human welfare is assured exclusively by the provision of material goods, technological devices, and institutional services, i.e. of the technosphere or surrogate world with which we are supplanting the biosphere or real one.

The trouble is that this world-view is so firmly entrenched in many of us that we cannot conceive of life without these benefits, except in terms of hideous misery and deprivation. Hence our refusal to face the fact that economic growth is no longer an option for medium-term policy, nor to consider the possibility that we should adapt to an inevitable economic contraction by systematically reducing our needs for the ‘benefits' that it provides.

Yet this is the only policy likely to prevent the socioeconomic discontinuities that at present threaten Canada and also the best means of maximising the real benefits (QOL) that can be made available to the Canadian people in order to assure their real welfare.

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122.	US News and World Report, 2 Sept. 1974.
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124.	US News and World Report.
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