Transcript The Earth is our Mother

The Earth is our Mother
What are the Economic Implications?
This Earth is precious. Teach your children what we
taught our children. The Earth is our Mother. The
Earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the
Earth. Every part of this Earth is sacred because
everything is connected, like the blood which unites
one body. Trees, air, water, animals, grass, Earth are
like many fine strands that weave the web of life;
men are merely a strand of it. Respect your Mother
because whatever befalls the Earth soon befalls the
sons of the Earth.
Chief Seattle, 1855
Ethical or Religious Basis?
Is religion helpful?
What is ecofeminism?
Personal spiritual journey
The usefulness of planetary support
The power of vision
The Earth is our Mother
Basis of indigenous belief
Land as a legacy and sacred: a bible
Resources of ‘relatives’
Respectful gratitude
Respectful agriculture: not beet and rape
Ourselves as Brother and Sisters
Could we accept inequality that leads to
41,000 deaths of children every day?
Would we choose the working conditions
of sweatshops in the South?
What would be the consequence for
conflict and war? Islam is only the latest
phoney enemy
Three Fundamental Problems of
Capitalism
Expropriation and appropriation
Inequality
War
The Problems we Need to Solve
Dimension
Capitalist
Green
Measurement
Progress
Balance
Market-place
Inequality
Justice
Work
Appropriation/
competition
Emancipation/
cooperation
International
relations
War
Peace
Value
Money
Energy
Replacing Progress with
Balance
The shark or the steady state
The cowboy or the spaceman
Brundtland definition
More isn’t always better
What is wrong with GDP?
What is wrong with GDP is quite simple. It only
performs, repeatedly, one simple arithmetic
calculation. It adds. Yet in reality much of what it
adds in fact serves to reduce the quality of life. It
is as if economists have not yet learned to
subtract. The central question we need to ask
about growth is ‘growth of what?’ No doctor
assumes that a growth of cancer is a good thing.
Yet the costs of crime, ill health, stress,
environmental damage and social breakdown can
all add to economic growth as measured by GDP.
Ed Mayo, New Economics Foundation
What is not counted?
Replacing Inequality with
Justice
Does the spread of the market increase
wealth?
What are the consequences of inequality?
Why capitalism needs inequality
Reclaim the right to social exclusion
Does the spread of the market
increase wealth?
World Bank studies suggest that
marketisation increases inequality
Adams, 2003: country-based study showed
that absolute wealth increased but so did
inequality
Milanovic, 2003: inequality increased
markedly within households and in poorer
countries
The health consequences of
inequality
ONS data show men in class I live 7.4
years long than those in class V (women
live 5.7 years longer)
A study reported in the BMJ showed that
there is a negative relationship between the
Robin Hood Index and longevity across
society as a whole
Inequality harms us all
The paper suggests that that there is a relation
between income distribution and life expectancy. It
concluded that variations between states in the
inequality of income were associated with increased
mortality from several causes. Relative poverty, i.e.
the size of the gap between the wealthy and less well
off, seems to matter in its own right: the greater the
gap between the rich and poor, the lower the average
life expectancy. This association is independent of
that between absolute income and life expectancy.
Therefore it matters, not only how affluent a country
is, but also how economic gains are distributed
among its members.
Poverty: the shame of it!
If at the earlier moment of industrialization the
persistence of poverty could be explained by a
productive capacity only rudimentarily
established, such an excuse is no longer
possible. It becomes clear, therefore, that the
survival of poverty is essential for ideological
and no material reasons. Indeed, the
maintenance of a felt experience of
insufficiency is essential to any capitalist
version of development.
Seabrook, J. (2001), Landscapes of Poverty
The Right to Social Exclusion
We had expected ruins and resignation, decay and
squalor, but our visit had made us think again: there was
a proud neighbourly spirit, vigorous activity with small
building cooperatives everywhere; we saw a flourishing
shadow economy. But at the end of the day, indulging in a
bit of stock-taking, the remark finally slipped out: ‘It's all
very well, but, when it comes down to it, these people are
still terribly poor.’ Promptly, one of our companions
sitffened:‘No somos pobres, somos Tepitanos’ (‘We are not
poor people, we are Tepitans’) . . . I had to admit to myself
in embarrassment that, quite involuntarily, the cliches of
development philosophy had triggered my reaction.
Building the Cooperative
Workplace
Who gains the value of work?
The freedom not to work
The quality of work under capitalism
The value of mutualism
The role of guilds
Marx’s Surplus Value
Hypothesis
The excess of what workers can produce over
what they need to consume. . . Political
economists, including Marx, were concerned
with the division of surplus value between
various members of society. Marx believed that
it would be appropriated by capitalists.
Oxford Dictionary of Economics (Oxford:
University Press), p. 454.
Loss of freedom and autonomy
The concept of wage slavery: enclosure of
land and removal of self-provisioning
Alienation: loss of autonomy: partial cause
of the low-serotonin society
The values of mutualism
Self-help and self-responsibility
Democracy
Equality
Equity
Solidarity
Social responsibility
The role of guilds
Managed the market rather than leaving it
‘free’, i.e. price and quantity
‘Entrepreneurial activities’ were banned
and could result in expulsion, e.g.
stockpiling.
Supported members in difficulty
Provided identity
Quality not just quantity of work
We are laughed at when we say that work must
be pleasant, but‘every one must be pleased
with his work’, a meiaeval Muttenberg
ordinance says, ‘and no one shall, while doing
nothing appropriate for himself what others
have produced by application and work,
because laws must be a shield for application
and work.’
Petr Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, 159-60.
The inspiration of the earth
Immanence
 Gaia: The meaning of that cloud-
speckled ocean-blue sphere was
made real to me by their newly
won scientific information about
the Earth and its sibling planets
Mars and Venus. Suddenly, as a
revelation, I saw the Earth as a
living planet. The quest to know
and understand our planet as one
that behaves like something alive,
and which has kept a home for us,
has been the Grail that beckoned
me ever since.
It came to me suddenly, just like a flash of
enlightenment, that to persist and keep
stable, something must be regulating the
atmosphere . . . My mind was well
prepared emotionally and scientifically
and it dawned on me that somehow life
was regulating climate as well as
chemistry. Suddenly the image of the
Earth as a living organism. . . Emerged in
my mind. At such moments, there is no
time or place for such niceties as the
qualification ‘of course it is not alive—it
merely behaves as if it were,’
Lovelock, The Quest for Gaia
Interconnectedness
 The story of the pine marten
Unity-in-diversity
 Wings of the Eagle: a story from the GitksanWet’suwet’en
International Justice to Replace
War
War to reinforce unjust settlement
Injustice of global trade
Trade subsidiarity
A new global trading currency based on
carbon dioxide
A capitalist war in Iraq
 US dependence on oil
 Indebtedness of US
corporations
 Need to impress
global financial
institutions of power
of the hegemon
The injustice of global trade
 Unjust to each other: Ghana, increased its
exports of cocoa by nearly 80 per cent between
1986 and 1996 but earned just 2 per cent
more in return.
 Unsustainable by the planet: OECD data show
that carbon dioxide emissions from Indonesia,
Malaysia, the Republic of Korea and Thailand
while they were positively regarded as Asian
Tigers because of their rapid development
increased by between 100 and 278 per cent.
Simms, A. (2000), Collision Course: Free Trade's Ride on the Global
Climate (London: New Economics Foundation).
Trade subsidiarity
 Begin with the local: only move further afield if
good is not available locally
 Food, clothes and building materials should be
available locally
 Luxury goods, e.g. tropical fruit, will increase by
the cost of transport-related CO2
 Complex goods will increase in price to reflect
energy intensity of production
A fair system of global trade
Need a neutral currency, not a national
currency
Objective is balance, so fees for trade
surpluses and trade deficits
EBCU: a new currency for trade, based on
‘carrying capacity’ of planet for CO2, and
shared on a global per capita basis
A Fair System of Money
Creation
Graph shows the
relative amounts of
money created by the
government and
banks
 Interest automatically requires growth
 Money should lubricate economic activity
Religion and capitalism
Modern capitalism is absolutely irreligious,
without internal union, without much public spirit,
often, though not always, a mere congeries of
possessors and pursuers.
R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of
Capitalism, p. 253
To replace capitalism we need a spiritually grounded vision
of a system that respects the planet as our mother and her
people as our brothers and sisters.