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The Ecologist
L'Ecologiste
Edward Goldsmith Speaks
The Way
Who would I discuss it (an ecological world view) with? According to society, I was wrong to have written The Way. A University course, based on the ideas expressed in my book The Way would be absolutely unthinkable. Every one of the 66 chapters conflicts with conventional knowledge. Indeed, the knowledge imparted in our universities is above all that which serves to rationalise and hence to legitimise economic development or progress, which is the source of all our problems.
The knowledge provided by The Way does exactly the opposite. Its object is to show that to maximize human welfare - something that Chthonic (traditional) man always knew - meant preserving at all costs the critical structure of the cosmos, seen as including the natural world and society itself. A society, as structured today, could not possibly accept my views. It is an essentially atomized society, in which people, instead of being organized into families and communities, as they always have been in the past, are organised instead into corporations and state institutions.
The latter are necessarily geared to economic development. It is entirely in their interests that the present knowledge continues to be taught as it is. If my ideas prevailed, these aberrant groupings would have to be dissolved - their functions returned to the families and communities that previously assumed them. My book has not had the influenced I expected it to. It has had very few reviews because the publishers did not who to send it to for review. The truth is that no one is qualified to review it. Environmentalists, ecologists, philosophers of science, anthropologists, economists etc could not understand more than part of the book.
It is very much easier to criticise western liberal ideas. In general, they take the atomised society for granted. They are against the family which is a basic unit of social behaviour and without which there can be no community or indeed society. The family is seen to be patriarchal, claustrophobic, tyrannical and God knows what else. For me, the family and the community are the natural units of social organisation. The term natural is not in favour today - but there is nothing wrong with it.
During the whole course of our biological, social, psychological and cognitive evolution, we evolved as members of families - we are thereby adapted to living as part of these units. Not surprisingly, it is at the level of the family and the community that most necessary social functions can be fulfilled. For instance, no one has found a substitute for the family for bringing up children or for looking after old people or the sick, none has found a substitute for the community as the basic unit of self-government.
Democracy that is not based on the community is not democracy because it is only at the level of the community that people can actually participate in government - only at that level, therefore, that government can truly be by the people. You and I cannot participate in government when it takes place at Westminster, still less when it takes place in Brussels. It is true of course, that my message is seen as right wing. If by right wing you mean conservative then I totally accept this criticism. I am a conservative in the true sense of the word, in that I believe in the family, in the community, in religion and in tradition. I am not a liberal.
However, I do not accept the position of the right wing parties of today that call themselves 'conservative' - in that their policies must necessarily lead to the destruction of all these things. Perhaps we have to choose between science and wisdom. I can't believe that science and technology leave us better off. The real wealth is nature, which science and technology are destroying. I am looking for a biospheric ethic in which aesthetics and other aspects of life that we tend to ignore, will be important. Many of the things that we allow in society and should not, such as destroying forests, eroding soils and depriving people of their land, are aesthetically unpleasant.
It is very nice to think of 'love conquering all'. However, there is very little love in an atomized mass society made up of highly alienated people. Love is something that occurs within a family and within a community and if you want it back you need to create families and communities. There is no alternative. Can we create such a society? Even if our government and industrialists do everything they can to avoid doing so, it will create itself. The question is only whether the transition is to be orderly or chaotic and whether it will be fast enough to avoid serious social and ecological discontinuities.
I published a number of detailed accounts on how to implement a programme of de-industrialisation in: Can Britain Survive (1971), A Blueprint For Survival (1972) and The Great U-Turn (1988). Today I'd do it somewhat differently. Of course a detailed programme is difficult because you have to adapt to circumstances as you move along. The general principles involved and general features of the process of course one can describe. You may note that none of our politicians are providing us with a detailed account of how we are to achieve the materialistic and technological paradise that they propose to us.
I also agree that nationalism is a disaster. The only defence we have against nationalism is the redevelopment of intermediary social forms like families, communities, and small societies. It is only once these have been destroyed that nationalism raises its ugly head. It is no coincidence that philosophers that justified Nazism such as Hegel believed that these intermediary forms should be dispensed with.
Of course, we have been subjected to several hundred years of propaganda against traditional tribal societies. This is a means of justifying economic development and progress. Of course, if you look at tribal societies in the light of western liberal ideas, it is easy to criticise them. However, it is very much easier to criticise western liberal ideas. In general, they take the atomized society for granted. They are against the family which is a basic unit of social behaviour and without which there can be no community or indeed society.
The family is seen to be patriarchal, claustrophobic, tyrannical and God knows what else. Take Kunihiro Yamate [Japanese writer / philosopher] - what he says is exactly what the transnational corporations want us to believe. It is nonsense. If "the traditional social system is dying", it is because it has been killed. If we remove the impact on it of our present political and economic activities, it will slowly reconstitute itself, though obviously not in exactly the same form. Let us not forget that families and communities in the past have taken all sorts of different forms - though they have always had a basic structure in common.
The Way is too complicated, I need to write a much simpler version. I never published my Against Progress book. I have given up Against Progress for the time being and am trying to do a new version of A Blueprint For Survival. An English version of Le Piège se Referme should come out next year (2004).
As regards my personal investments, i.e. investments over which I have some control, all the shares I have bought are environmental shares, mainly in renewable energies. It might be worth noting that I have lost about 80 to 90 percent of my money on these investments, as governments have done nothing to promote renewable energies.
The foundations that we are associated with are the JMG Foundation, the Foundation de Sauve, The Climate Initiatives Fund. There is a new one about to come into being, called The Manuka Club. They are all funded by different members of the family. The motto of all of them is 'funding the unfundable'. We don't publish details of them and the funding we provide. It is a waste of money.
Climate
One tends to get an ice age - not a little ice age - but a real ice age, every 10,000 to 12,000 years. It has been 11,000 years since we had the last one, so we are due for a new one. When it occurs, it will cause a lot of problems and make much of the planet uninhabitable. As indeed does global warming. To suggest that climate change can be predicted by history - I am not so sure about the historical approach because you are now treading on uncharted territory, creating conditions that have not existed during the historical period.
It is also quite true that the nuclear industry is taking advantage of global warming. It provides an excuse for more investment in nuclear power. The excuse is extremely weak. We published an article in The Ecologist showing that as soon as we have to mine lower grade uranium, the fossil fuels required for the mining will be such that the nuclear industry (if one takes into account the mining of the uranium, the enrichment of the ore etc etc) will be producing as much CO2 as the fossil fuel industry. Greenpeace, like all other serious environmental groups, are doing what they can to discredit the nuclear industry's attempts to take advantage.
The way to deal with global warming is to cut energy consumption by 60 - 80 percent now, which the IPCC has told us is required to stabilize climate. This would not only go a long way towards dealing with global warming, it would also solve a host of other problems. It would drastically reduce the problem of acid rain and also the problem of air pollution in our cities, correspondingly improving people's health. It would also provide a lot of jobs and reduce costs to industry, drastically reducing our dependence on the Middle East as a source of oil, etc.
In fact, the measures, rather than cost a lot of money as we are told, would have exactly the opposite effect, and save a lot of money. The campaign to fight global warming would be necessary in other words, even if there was no global warming. It is essential that action be taken against global warming, which could make this planet uninhabitable in the next fifty years. The fact that the planet might freeze up is possible - certainly on the basis of our recent experience. However, it is by no means certain, and it could be that we will not have another ice age for a 1,000 or even 2,000 years.
In the meantime, we are facing an immediate catastrophe. Global warming is already happening, and with consequences that are becoming apparent. We are seeing everywhere the destabilisation of climate, which is affecting agriculture and will soon affect our health, as tropical insects and pathogens of all sorts move from the tropics into temperate areas. The way to deal with global warming is to cut energy consumption by 60 - 80 percent now, which the IPCC has told us is required to stabilize climate.
This would not only go a long way towards dealing with global warming, it would also solve a host of other problems. It would drastically reduce the problem of acid rain and also the problem of air pollution in our cities, correspondingly improving people's health. It would also provide a lot of jobs and reduce costs to industry, drastically reducing our dependence on the Middle East as a source of oil, etc. In fact, the measures, rather than cost a lot of money as we are told, would have exactly the opposite effect, and save a lot of money. The campaign to fight global warming would be necessary in other words, even if there was no global warming.
We are doing a special issue on global warming in March 1999 to coincide with the November meeting in the Argentine. It will be entitled "Can We Survive Global Warming?" and the answer we are all going to give is "No!" If it continues for long enough probably something like 40 or 50 years, we would probably be extinct. It depends of course on the positive feedbacks, of which there are very many, and which are difficult to take into account in the mathematical models of the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change).
I also agree that it is time for anger and outrage. I certainly feel it myself and have done for 30 years. The question is that if one expresses this anger and outrage too vehemently it will put people off. In any case, The Ecologist has got a style of its own. It tries to influence educated people. 30 percent to 40 percent of our subscriptions go to institutions such as University libraries, etc. The most important thing is that we have to move in the right direction fairly quickly which is towards a localized community-based economy if we want to avoid the worst effects of global warming.
How far we go is a matter for discussion. Many of my colleagues in the International Forum of Globalization would not agree with me completely, some of them believe in computers and other modern technologies (David Korten, David Morris for instance) others do not. Scientist Stephen Schneider's statement is based on the crudest possible economics.
A programme to cut down on global warming would reduce costs massively. There would no longer be any need for huge airports, big dams, nuclear power stations, motorways - all the things that really cost money. You wouldn't need expensive inputs into agriculture, which would be on a smaller scale and largely organic. What he is talking about is 'opportunity cost', the cost of foregoing a great deal of Gross National Product.
The answer is, so what? That is not a cost in the true sense of the term. You will not have to pay more money, a few corporations will have to forego some of their turnover, others will close down, but again, so what? The reduction in the emission of greenhouse gases is clearly the first thing that must be done to combat global warming. Reforestation comes next.
Unfortunately, many corporations feel they can go on producing more greenhouse gases if they involve themselves in some reforestation project, which usually takes the form of planting monocultures of fast-growing exotics. You are quite right, of course. I should provide details of my global carbon dioxide debts. They are difficult to calculate and I plead guilty in my use of aeroplanes, though I take trains whenever I can. Everything is wrong. I shouldn't really exist.
You are quite right, we have never done an article on soil remineralization (mineralomics, rock dusting, earth regeneration) and I think we should do one. I shall certainly read the latest edition of John Hamaker and Don Weaver's book, The Survival Of Civilization.
Although I have never really gone into the writings of Professor Kenneth Hsu, I cannot deny that part at least, of the planet, can freeze rather than boil. There was an article recently in Nature too, which suggested that the Gulf Stream is weakening faster than expected - so I hear - I haven't yet see the article. In any case, we know that there is a possibility of an abrupt climate change, as has occurred in the past. It is what Jim Lovelock calls a 'climate flip' that could lead us to an unpredictable new climatic regime. There is no reason why this couldn't mean another ice age. Anything is possible.
What we know, is that this is the first time in our climatic history that we have had two successive periods of heating up - the first was the end of the last ice age and the beginning of the present interglacial, the second is that occurring today. As this has never occurred in the last hundred million years, as far as I know, it could lead to almost anything.
Globalisation
The corporations are involved in an orgy of planetary destruction and that nothing is being done about it. Especially after the GATT treaty their activities are completely out of control. Unless something dramatic happens, like a complete collapse of the world economy, we have simply had it. The planet will be uninhabitable in a matter of decades. The media are not going to tell the truth or they would lose all the advertisements from the corporations, and it is this that keeps them in business.
In any case, if people were told the truth they would not believe it. If a lot of people believed our book A Blueprint For Survival it is because it was countersigned by 30 leading academic figures, whom they thought had actually written the book. If they knew it had been written by Robert Allen and myself, whom nobody knew, no one would have believed it at all. GATT will create a world made-to-measure for the transnational corporations.
Maastricht is the biggest joke of all. A free trade zone is a zone in which no social, ecological or moral consideration is allowed to interfere with trade. An environment that favours big corporations will destroy small companies. So poor countries will be bankrupted and their people will become a ragged throng of economic refugees. There'll be massacres. Things will be made worse by the population explosion, itself a consequence of development. It's going to solve itself in the most horrible way possible. Pressure of numbers will mean war, new plagues immune to antibiotics, the collapse of societies ...
What I propose seems unlikely today but you mustn't forget that the global economy is going to marginalise much of humanity. That will completely change things. 75 percent of people will be living outside the system and more willing to oppose it, as they will no longer have anything to lose by doing so. I agree that there is no compromise. If the corporations are given free reign, as they are today, we have had it. We can't share this world with them. Either they go, or the natural world and humanity as a whole goes, of that there is no doubt.
Of course, what is more likely is that there will be a massive economic collapse. It is just a question of time. The sooner the better, though of course it is going to be very uncomfortable and very miserable for a lot of people. As for action at an inter-governmental level, this is difficult. Governments everywhere are controlled by transnational corporations, more so now than ever before.
The book The Earth Brokers on the Rio Conference by Mathias Finger and Pratap Chaterjee (Routledge) tries to show that all efforts by governments to involve themselves in the environment from the United Nations Stockholm Conference to the South Report to the Bruntland Report to the Rio Conference, have been hopeless. They all conclude that to solve our own environmental problems you need more economic growth managed by the corporations within the free market.
I don't agree about the insurance industry. Either we want to win or we don't. Of course the insurance industry has been part of the problem but that is no reason for not encouraging them to become part of the solution. Greenpeace can possibly be criticised on a number of counts (e.g. undemocratic, not geophysiological) - but its nevertheless the best environmental group we have. If you want to get rid of that too, then you are still further reducing our chances of achieving anything.
Greenpeace is indeed trying to get the insurance industry involved, because the insurance industry would not survive global warming. I can't see that there is anything wrong with this, you've got to get support where you can get it. There is nothing wrong with getting the insurance industry working on our side - to say the opposite, I find cynical and negative.
With regards my brother's campaign - sovereignty is an important issue. There are 41 wars going on at the moment and they are all civil wars, largely caused by small nations desperate to obtain their sovereignty by breaking out of some empire that has been constituted for purely administrative and economic reasons. An example is the war in the Sudan which has been going on for years, in which the black Nilotic tribes of the south are trying to break away from a country which is in fact run by the Arabs in the north, with whom they have nothing in common.
A European superstate would create similar conditions and could only lead to civil war. It would also provide a more effective political infrastructure for what is in effect a far too big economic free zone. I don't see that there are so many contradictions in my brother Jimmy's message. He campaigned last year to stop the US Congress ratifying the GATT Treaty and got together a large number of Senators and Representatives. Among the things he said was that if they ratified the GATT, no body of people in human history would have created as much misery and poverty as they would do. And who, he asked would be the beneficiaries?
The answer is, of course, "the super-rich, people like myself" ...
"But what good would it do me if I earned a few extra hundred million dollars if it means being surrounded by totally impoverished, marginalised and starving people. I would feel like someone who has been dealt a winning hand of poker while sailing on the Titanic. In other words, even from the point of view of a very rich businessman, what people are doing today is mad, both TNCs and the governments simply don't know what the implications of their actions are. For instance, how are they going to sell all the stuff they produce if everybody is totally impoverished and unemployed?"
I understand that the chairmen of big companies are becoming concerned about this. My brother (James) considers that Kohl is trying to achieve by economic means what the Kaiser and Hitler failed to achieve militarily. If the Maastricht Treaty is really observed, then Germany will totally dominate Europe and this will undoubtedly give rise to wars as countries will try to extricate themselves from a system that is totally dominated by the Germans. My brother said this on German television. The programme may be relayed in the UK, I know BBC TV are trying to buy it.
Of course, we [Jimmy and I] do not really work together, but separately, and occasionally help each other in different ways, but our activities are largely separate. He does not agree with everything I say, any more than I agree with everything he says, but we agree with enough of each other's ideas to be able to work together on certain things. The Case Against The Global Economy (1997) is not written by environmentalists. It is written by critics of the global economy, who object to it on all sorts of different grounds.
As far as I can remember the only environmentalists are Robert Goodland of the World Bank, and myself. Herman Daly is an economist, concerned with reforming economics; Jeremy Rifkin is concerned with all sorts of issues, some of which are indeed environmental; David Morris is concerned with community self-sufficiency; Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate etc. This is not a book about what is happening to the environment, it is a book that tries to show that the global economy is catastrophic.
We have included 43 chapters, which cover a certain number of these points of view, but admittedly we have not dealt with forests as much, nor with the exploitation of wildlife, or for that matter, with Jim Lovelock's Gaia thesis. If we want to solve our environmental problems, the only strategy is to reduce the impact of our economic activities on an environment that cannot sustain the present impact.
In my article on Trade and the Environment (Can the environment survive the global economy?in The Case Against the Global Economy), I point out that many of our more destructive activities, including logging, are done in order to cater for the export trade. If the export trade was abolished, environmental destruction would be reduced very dramatically. This reduction in the scale of our activities would also help solve a lot of other problems, such as the availability of jobs, the reconstruction of communities, etc. It's going to solve itself in the worst way possible. Do you accept the trend or reverse it? Dismantle it (the system) or it will dismantle itself. Mobilize the people.
Ecosystems
Natural selection is not the only mechanism of evolution - only the principle one. Of course it all depends on what you mean by 'natural'. There is a real sense in which a climax ecosystem for instance, is more natural than a modern city. Also, a local community is more natural than the state. I personally take the natural world as it evolved as being natural. I see progress as being a reversal of this process. It is not evolution but anti-evolution, though I am about the only person to say this at the moment.
Eugene Odum who is the most prestigious ecologist alive today talks about our present society heading for a 'disclimax' which is the opposite of a 'climax'. Geophysiology is a term coined by Jim Lovelock and is based on the notion that Gaia is an organism and has a physiology. I think the term is wrong. Gaia is not an organism it is a natural system of which organisms, molecules and Gaia herself are specific instances. They have a lot in common with each other but they are not exactly the same.
James Lovelock (pioneer of the Gaia Hypothesis) is one of the really important people writing on these views, but his views are pretty odd on a number of subjects. For instance, he is quite happy with transnational corporations and is in favour of nuclear power. Jim Lovelock position on a number of subjects is very odd, I agree. For instance, he is the first person to have discovered the ozone layer depletion, yet he does not think it is a problem now. I don't know why he says this. Jim Lovelock is a remarkable man. His Gaia Hypothesis is of great importance, but he has some crazy ideas - nuclear power is one of them. Nuclear power, in any case, is not a way for dealing with climate change, as we pointed out in our special issue.
By the way, he is also dead against agriculture and thinks we should feed people on pills. He is a brilliant but very strange man. Like many scientists he overdoes the importance of scientific knowledge. As you know, I am not an admirer of science at all. However, I do respect him, and accept his failings. I don't even bother to discuss them with him. I have always said that Lovelock has mad ideas, particularly about the desirability of nuclear power. His view of corporations of course is absurd. The big ones at least should not be allowed to exist. His view of the environmental movement is ridiculous.
Jonathon Porritt is a very remarkable man, who has now become far too much of a moderate though. For Lovelock to say that no noticeable environmental disaster has yet happened is of course ridiculous. That he has made absurd statements on other subjects does not detract from the importance of his work. The Ecologist is certainly not going to praise his views on the nuclear energy and on the environmental movement - that is quite obvious.
I personally, together with a few of my colleagues, collected 3 million signatures asking for a special meeting of the security council of the United Nations on the subject of global deforestation. 30 of my colleagues invaded the UN carrying the documents with the signatures in wheelbarrows. When Mr Perez de Cuellar, who was then Secretary General, refused to come down and see us, we staged a sit-in and refused to leave until he agreed to see us.
Accompanied by many of my colleagues, I went to Washington the next day, and obtained a meeting with a number of Senators, including Al Gore, asking for the closure of the World Bank, because it was and still is destroying the world's forests. Among the people who accompanied me was an Amazonian Indian Chief, the head of the Chipko [tree hugging] movement in the Himalayas, and others concerned with the world's forests.
I agree that bacteria and some worms contribute more to the planet's live-sustaining processes than do humans today. I am all in favour of the Countryside Alliance. Fox hunting can be defended on the grounds that it is one of the things that keep people together in otherwise disintegrated communities. English villages were originally held together by the Church, which is not doing particularly well, and by the pubs. Now pubs are being closed down to transform them into housing, which is more remunerative. All that remains is the hunt.
Some people object to it because it is cruel, but they would do better to concentrate on far crueller activities such as keeping thousands of pigs and chickens in concentration camp conditions. I personally would allow fox hunting, but measures should be taken to give the fox a better chance of getting away. In particular, once it seeks refuse in its den it should be spared. However, as I understand it, as I have never hunted myself, it is dug out of its hole and killed. That to me is not sport but massacre.
In addition, I don't agree on meat eating. Much marginal land is unsuitable for arable farming but can be used for cattle raising. Of course, most of it should be returned to forests, but that is probably impossible today given the massive population of this and other countries. A meat-eating society only thrives when there is no shortage of oil or water, and where the price of both these key commodities is very low. We are now moving very quickly into a world where both water and oil will be increasingly scarce and the price of these commodoties only escalates. People will be forced in the direction of vegetarianism. Stephen Byrnes' article ("The Myths of Vegetarianism") should never have been written. We are already seeing what expensive oil is doing to the motor car industry. The sale of SUVs has already fallen by more than 40 percent as a result of the increased price of oil.
Education
I agree that real ecological education does not exist in the UK, and no one is stating that economic development is wrong. It is still seen as a panacea to all our problems. No one is teaching an ecological worldview. There is no course that deals with ecological philosophy etc. We have to do something about it. Every course in the UK, tows the government line, or it wouldn't survive.
Joan Tiffany / Karl Jaeger at the International Honors Program in Global Ecology at Bard College, USA, have got something that works quite well, but it is expensive. There are few subsidies, if any. If it is going to last, it has got to pay for its way. We have no alternative but to charge people. What needs to be done is to set up a much cheaper one over here. It is something we must do some time. With regards to IHP (International Honors Program), it has its defects. It is also unecological in the sense that it takes people round the world. I agree it is expensive.
Modern ecology has been perverted. Instead of serving to rationalise the sort of ecological society that you and I are talking about it serves more than anything else to rationalise economic development. I describe the way it has been perverted in The Way but it is described in greater detail in Donald Worster's book Nature's Economy (Cambridge University Press). At the moment, Environmental Science courses in most universities are being closed down or transformed. There is no longer any ecological thinking involved. It's all highly technical and is designed to be the sort of thing that corporations are willing to subsidise. If they are not willing to do so then the courses are simply discontinued.
I agree that no one is going to agree with me today, not even people I work with like (biologist) Professor Brian Goodwin. It is nonsense to say that the worldview advocated in The Way is only true if the world is seen as a closed system. If the world were a closed system there would not be any life on it at all. So what he is saying is meaningless. Peter De La Cour (Greening Of Higher Education Council UK), I know well - thank God my ideas are 'out of date', as the ideas being promoted today are madder than any of those proposed in the past. Socio-biology is ludicrous, relativism in Anthropology is ludicrous, Modern Ecology is hopeless and has been perverted. I am delighted to be 'out of date'. I'm no more qualified to answer these questions than you are. I've just read more than you, that's all. Anyone can know these things.
