From: Ray E. Harrell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Somewhere I read that the market must expand for it to work as a system.
>
>Could some of the economists fill me in on that one?
All of our institutions are based on endless physical growth, thus all of
our institutions must either change of perish. Here is a rather long scan
from what I believe to be the best book on the subject:
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Political Theory
It is not the aim of this book to prescribe the form of post-industrial
civilization but rather to document the existence of ecological
scarcity, show how it will come to dominate our political life, and then
make plain the inability of our current political culture and machinery
to cope with its challenges. From this analysis, a range of possible
answers to the crisis will emerge. For example, if individualism is
shown to be problematic in an era of ecological scarcity, then the
answer must lie somewhere toward the communal end of the political
spectrum. Also, certain general dilemmas that confront us -- for example,
the political price attached to continued technological growth will be
made explicit.
In brief, then, this work is a prologue to a political theory of the
steady state. Yet although it stops well short of formulating a genuine
political theory of the steady state, it is directly concerned with the
great issues that have dominated traditional thought about politics. Our
essential purpose is to show how the perennial, but dormant, questions
of political philosophy have been revived by ecological scarcity. We
shall see, for example, that the political problems related to the task
of environmental management have to do primarily with the ends of
political association, rather than with the political means needed to
achieve agreed-upon goals. The questions that arise from the ensuing
analysis are essentially value questions: What is the common interest?
Under current conditions, is liberal democracy a suitable and desirable
vehicle for achieving it? What, indeed, is the good life for men and
women? In other words, we confront the same kinds of questions that
Aristotle, in common with the other great theorists of politics, asks.
We are obliged by the environmental crisis to enlarge our conception of
politics to its classical dimensions. To use a famous capsule
description of politics, the questions about who gets what, when, how,
and why must be reexamined and answered anew by our generation. Our goal
in this book is to set the agenda for such a philosophical reexamination
of our politics.
However, we do not approach this task as does a traditional political
philosopher. Past theorists seeking guidance for human action have
grounded their ideas on revelation or induction. Either, like Plato,
they have appealed to some a priori metaphysical principle from which
the shape of the desirable political order can be deduced, or, like
Aristotle, they have examined human behavior over time to see whether
certain kinds of political institutions are more effective than others
in producing a happy and virtuous people. Of course, many theorists have
mixed these approaches, and some have introduced other considerations.
In almost all cases, however, humanity's linkage to nature has counted
for little. By contrast, like Malthus, we start with humanity's
dependence on nature and the basic human problems of biological
survival.
To be sure, most political and social thinkers have acknowledged
humanity's ultimate dependence on nature, and a few have devoted some
attention to the specific effects that environmental constraints have
had on people. In Book One of The Politics, Aristotle discusses scarcity
and other ecological limits, implying that because of them slavery may
be necessary for civilized life. Plato in Book Two of The Republic and
Rousseau in The Second Discourse also display a subtle awareness of the
impact the evolving process of getting one's daily bread can have on
social institutions. Nevertheless, with the major exception of Malthus,
political and social theorists have tended to take the biological
existence of men and women as given. This is no longer possible.
Nor is it possible any longer to ignore humanity's impact on the
environment. Of course, concern about this impact and the consequent
damage to human welfare also has a long history (Glacken 1956). Over two
thousand years ago, Plato in Greece and Mencius in China both worried
about the destruction of habitat caused by overgrazing and
deforestation. The early Christian writer Tertullian called wars,
plagues, famines, and earthquakes blessings because they "serve to prune
away the luxuriant growth of the human race" (Hardin 1969, p. 18), and
Aristotle found the poverty caused by population growth to be the parent
of revolution and crime: "If no restriction is imposed on the rate of
reproduction...poverty is the inevitable result; and poverty produces,
in its turn, civic dissension and wrong doing" (Barker 1952, p. 59).
Clearly, certain of the environmental problems we face today have been
with human beings since the very beginning of civilization.
The character of these problems, however, has changed markedly over the
centuries. In ancient times, humanity's impact on the environment was
local; by the eighteenth century, worldwide effects were becoming
apparent; writers of the nineteenth century remarked on the extent of
this impact and its cumulative effects; and observers in this century
have focused on the acceleration of change. Accumulating quantitative
impact has thus brought about a qualitative difference in our relation
to the physical world: We are now the prime agent of change in the
biosphere and are capable of destroying the environment that supports
us. The radically different conditions prevailing today virtually force
us to be ecological theorists, grounding our analysis on the basic
problems of human survival on a finite and vulnerable planet endowed
with limited resources.
A second contrast between this work and traditional political theory is
that, again like Malthus, our effort throughout is to identify the
critical limits to and constraints on human action. We wish to discover
what is possible -- or, alternatively, what we are forced to do --
rather than what is desirable. In other words, values come last in this
supposedly philosophical analysis.* This is not because we disdain the
eternal questions of value, but because a value-neutral approach is
called for on very practical grounds.
[ * As will be explained shortly, values will be crucial to creating a
steady-state society, but values that are widely accepted today as
immutable may have to change so that we can either avert or endure
harmful changes in the natural world. ]
First of all, philosophical, ethical, and spiritual arguments seem to
appeal only to the converted. Hard-headed scientists, technologists,
bureaucrats, and businesspeople -- the men and women who make the basic
decisions that shape our futures -- do not often pay much attention to
such arguments. If one is to argue constructively with the people who
incarnate our cultural and political norms, one must argue the case in
their own terms. This requires that one adopt a fundamentally empirical
and scientific or agnostic approach, putting aside the question of
values, at least temporarily, to find instead what is possible given the
natural laws that govern our planet.
Second, one of the most important reasons for focusing on limits and
constraints is the nature of our predicament. Although the human species
has never enjoyed total freedom of choice, at some times and places a
relative abundance of everything needed for the maintenance of life and
the construction of culture has made the latitude of choice
correspondingly large. By contrast, people cast adrift in a lifeboat
with short supplies, say, or the trapped inhabitants of a besieged town,
face many painful dilemmas; if they wish to survive, they must impose
stringent limits on their behavior. Similarly, by its very nature a
spaceship imposes a certain type of social design on those embarked. As
our circumstances come to resemble those of space travelers, we may
expect knowledge of this social design to tell us a great deal about
what we must do -- in other words, to plot the relatively narrow range
within which the values and the moral requirements can lie. Nature's
dictates become our policies if we wish to survive.
Nevertheless, questions of value are inescapable. There being no
agreed-upon prime value -- not even survival -- that dominates all
others, solving every problem of public and private morality
necessitates trade-offs between desired goods. To illustrate briefly,
even if ecologists could predict with absolute certainty that a
continuation of current trends would produce massive death and other
catastrophes by A.D. 2000, people might still decide, in a spirit of
profligate fatalism, to doom posterity rather than forgo current
enjoyment. Moreover, we shall not face totally forced choices. There are
a number of possible solutions to the lifeboat problem and an even
larger number to the spaceship problem, so the outcome will be the
result of a complex interplay between limits and constraints, our
present and future capacity to evade or manipulate limits, and our
values. In brief, science can only define the limits to political and
social vision; it cannot prescribe the contents. Where science ends,
wisdom necessarily begins, and we hope this book will help prepare the
reader for making decisions and judgments at that point. [ pp. 11-14,
ECOLOGY AND THE POLITICS OF SCARCITY REVISITED, William Ophuls, 1992 ]
Jay -- www.dieoff.com
