January 2, 1992, For publication in Development by the Society for International Development
DEVELOPMENT HERESY AND THE ECOLOGICAL REVOLUTION
David Korten argues that the search for solutions to the environmental crisis generally misses an essential point, i.e. that human economic activity has passed a critical threshold and now fills the available ecological space. Policy prescriptions that fail to acknowledge this reality are deepening the crisis and weakening society's institutional ability to address it. The crisis can be resolved only through a transformation of thought and institutions comparable to that of the Copernican Revolution.
Five hundred years ago, when Columbus landed in the Western hemisphere, the prevailing system of human thought in Europe maintained that our earth was flat and the sun, stars and planets revolved around it. These beliefs provided the foundation of scientific thought and the society's institutions of moral and political authority. Then in 1543, the year of his death, Nicolas Copernicus published Revolution of the Celestial Spheres setting forth the thesis that the earth is only one among the planets that revolve around the sun--itself one of countless such stars of the cosmos.
Copernicus spoke a humbling truth regarding the insignificance of humanity's physical position among the stars--considered a heresy in its day and a threat to many cherished human institutions. His act and the resulting change in perspective regarding man's place in the cosmos, deflating as it was of a long standing human arrogance, liberated human society from a number of debilitating intellectual and institutional constraints, ushered in the age of science, and led to human accomplishments that have exceeded even the most fanciful imaginings of the greatest thinkers of his day.
This was not, unfortunately, the end of human society's propensity toward a debilitating and, in our present case, potentially fatal arrogance. The highly evolved human intelligence that produced the scientific revolution and made possible the industrial age has given our species a decided competitive advantage over other forms of life on this planet in the competition for ecological space. This success has been of such magnitude as to lead us once again into a trap of blinding arrogance--a belief that our technology makes us the masters of nature and places us beyond the reach of natural law.
We now face the need for a new revolution in our self-perception and institutions, an ecological revolution, with implications for human behavior and institutions that may be more profound than those that followed from the insights of Copernicus. While such a revolution will be certain to bring its own trauma, there is substantial prospect that it may also release a new era of progress as far beyond the current human imagination as the accomplishments of the modern era were to those who lived in the Middle Ages. In the absence of such a revolution we will almost certainly remain locked onto our present course of social and ecological disintegration--the outcome of which may well make life in the Middle Ages look advanced.
Three Heresies of the Ecological Revolution
Certain beliefs have become so deeply embedded in the collective belief system of most development institutions that to challenge them is to set oneself apart from the development profession--to commit heresy against the faith and its moral foundations. Three heresies against mainstream development thought define the foundation beliefs of the ecological revolution as it applies to the development enterprise.
Few discussions of sustainable development seriously raise such issues--consequently revealing how far we remain from dealing in realistic terms with the environmental and social crisis that currently grips our world.
What may be the ecological revolution's most important intellectual treatise to date recently emerged from an unlikely source, the World bank--contemporary mother church of orthodox development theology. Edited by Robert Goodland, Herman Daly, and Salah El Serafy (1991) and issued as a working paper in July 1991 by the Environment Department of the World Bank, Environmentally Sustainable Economic Development: Building on Brundtland, challenges the most fundamental premises of that theology, as set forward in the Bank's World Development Report 1991.
The centerpiece of the Goodland, Daly, and El Serafy heresy is the observation that current economic theory and policy are based on an assumption of an empty world, i.e., a world in which the scale of human economic activity is sufficiently small relative to the scale of earth's ecological system that its impact is inconsequential. The contributors to this unusual collection, who include two Nobel laureates in economics, document the increasingly evident reality that this assumption no longer holds. We now live in a full world, one in which our aggregate economic activity fills the available ecological space.
No single idea is more fundamental to contemporary development thought and practice than the premise that sustained economic growth is both possible and the key to human progress. It is the foundation on which most of our institutions of economic management and assistance have been built.
Consequently, it is not surprising that these institutions have had difficulty coming to terms with the real meaning of our environmental crisis, preferring to view it as simply another investment problem and insisting thereby that economic growth is basically good for the environment because it creates the surplus resources required for investment in environmental protection. The more fundamental truth that the human economy is dependent on and subordinate to earth's eco-system is neatly sidestepped. They call themselves green, request additional funds for environmental projects, and proceed with business-as-usual.
Physical Throughput
It is useful to reduce the sustainable development problem to its essential elements. Much of what we measure as economic growth depends on increasing the flow of physical materials--such as petroleum, minerals, biomass and water--through our economic system. We depend on nature to supply these materials (input functions) and to absorb the resulting wastes (sink functions). Nature's capacity in this regard has proven to be enormous, but not unlimited. We have now reached those limits, particularly on the sink functions side. Systems of economic thought and management premised on the absence of such limits must now be replaced by systems of thought and management that acknowledge them.(1)
Arguments that our technology frees us from such limits assume that manmade capital serves as an adequate substitute for natural capital. While this is true to an extent--we have made considerable progress in reducing the amount of scarce physical materials required to serve specific human needs--such possibilities also face natural limits. In most instances natural and manmade capital are complementary--not substitutes. Indeed many improvements in manmade capital contribute primarily to our ability to exploit natural capital. In the end, the sawmill has no function without a forest. The fishing boat has no function without fish. The real issue is not economic growth per se. It is the rate of physical extraction from and disposal of physical substances to the environment. The rate of such throughput is highly correlated with economic growth. Consequently, to assume that economic growth, as we currently define it, can continue without limit is to posit an impossibility (Daly, 1990).
The debate as to whether it is the rich or the poor who bear the primary responsibility for the environmental crisis is readily resolved by a few simple figures. According to the Worldwatch Institute each American on average accounts for the consumption of 52 kilos of physical materials each day (Durning, 1991, pp. 160-61). This contrasts starkly with the estimated average consumption of 1½ kilos of locally collected biomass by the one billion inhabitants of our planet who live in absolute poverty.
Viewed from this perspective the perversity of the argument that poverty is a primary cause of environmental destruction and economic growth is the key to increased environmental responsibility becomes starkly evident. Such arguments only demonstrate that the institutions that advance them, of which the World Bank is a leading example,(2) are ill prepared to provide needed leadership toward resolving the world's ecological crisis. The prescriptions put forward by such institutions in the name of sustainable development should be viewed with skepticism, and their efforts to gain control of the environmental agenda should be resisted.
Managing Per Capita Consumption
We are no longer talking about an expanding pie of resource consumption. Rather we are talking about the allocation of a finite flow of physical resources through out economic system to meet the needs of the 5 billion inhabitants of our planet--destined to grow to 12.5 billion before stabilizing in the next century.
One billion of us, those of us who travel by car and plane, eat predominantly meat diets, consumer large quantities of bottled beverages, and use a variety of packaged, disposable products pose the primary threat to earth's ecology and are properly identified as over-consumers.
Another billion who travel by foot, eat nutritionally substandard meatless diets, drink contaminated water, have virtually no wastes, and often lack even basic shelter may be identified as marginals. They suffer intolerable deprivation--a disgrace to civilized society.
In between are the roughly three billion sustainers who travel by bicycle and public surface transportation, eat healthy diets of grains and vegetables supplemented by small amounts of meat, drink clean unbottled water plus some tea and coffee and recycle most of their wastes. They live in basic harmony with our planet's ecology.(3)
It becomes starkly evident in our finite world that:
Our systems of economic management, currently geared to increasing system throughput (growth), must now be transformed to concentrate on reallocating the use and benefits of existing levels of throughput to optimize human-well being (development) at equitable and relatively modest per capita levels of physical consumption. The fact is that there is potential for all of earth's people to live well, though not extravagantly, at current aggregate levels of resource use--if the aggregate flow through is properly reallocated and population growth is brought under control with all due speed.
Reallocation and population control are closely related issues. While population growth could be substantially reduced simply by making adequate family planning services available to all who would like them, it is unlikely that population levels can be stabilized until every individual is assured of the right to at least a minimum human standard of physical consumption. The more rapidly population growth is contained, the greater the share of the total aggregate resource flow that each individual will be entitled to enjoy and the greater the prospects for social and ecological stability. Understood in these terms, all citizens of this planet have a stake in seeing both the redistribution and population control agendas accomplished as rapidly as possible.
Waste Reduction as Liberation
One key to change is to recognize that high levels of income and physical consumption do not necessarily translate into high levels of human well-being. UNDP's recently initiated series of Human Development Reports makes this abundantly clear by demonstrating that high levels of human well-being are possible at relatively low levels of per capita national income. It also highlights the evident reality that even the wealthiest industrial countries continue to be plagued with poverty, significant environmental problems, and a disintegrating social fabric. While some minimal level of economic output is essential to human well-being, growth itself is neither necessary nor sufficient.
The UNDP series also demonstrates that a reallocation of existing public resources could virtually eliminate human deprivation--if we were to set this as a priority--without giving up any of demonstrable human benefit. Demilitarization presents a particularly obvious opportunity to eliminate significant waste of financial and physical resources while simultaneously eliminating one perhaps the greatest single cause of human suffering in our modern world. An estimated ten to thirty percent of all global environmental degradation is due to military related activities and worldwide military use of aluminum, nickel, and platinum surpasses total Third World demand for these materials (Renner, 1991).
Other opportunities for reducing resource use without harm to the quality of life are suggested by the fact that Americans consume 2.5 times as much energy per capita as do Japanese, and 1.7 times as much as West Germans. An East German eats 3.6 times as much red meat as a Japanese. An American consumes by weight more than twice the amount of paper products consumed by a Norwegian. Americans and Canadians generate roughly twice as much garbage per person as do West Europeans and Japanese (Brown, et. al., 1991).
Reducing the consumption of meat and animal fats would result in health improvements for most of the world's over consumers. Reducing commuting times and automobile use through improved public transit and the reallocation of urban space would likely result in significant reductions in energy use and pollution and improve the quality of life for millions of relatively affluent consumers.
Reducing unnecessary consumption simultaneously reduces income needs, potentially freeing time for activities that bring real happiness--including family, friends, and voluntary community service. "Modern" society has tended to sacrifice these satisfactions to a compulsive drive for financial success. The result is a sense of social, psychological, and spiritual emptiness that multitudes of advertisers assure us will be satisfied by the purchase of their particular gadget or status symbol. The greater the emptiness, the greater the drive for more income to purchase the goods expected to fill it--an endless, futile, and self-destructive quest. Overconsumption is a manifestation of psychological dysfunction.
This is not to suggest that the changes in lifestyle and economic organization required will be easy to accomplish. The barriers posed by existing social values and institutions are enormous. The end result, however, need not involve significant deprivation. There is considerable potential for the changes in fact to be liberating, particularly to the extent that they result in freedom from economic slavery, restore a sense of community and the beauty of our environment, and encourage our further spiritual, intellectual, and social development. Reducing dependence of the relatively wealthy on the automobile and airplane, meat based diets, and disposable products and packaging materials may be a relatively small price to pay.
The catechism of contemporary development theology is nowhere more clearly articulated than in the World Bank's World Development Report 1991. Here the Bank presents its assessment of the lessons of forty years of development experience and concludes that the market is the key to economic growth. It therefore calls on governments to complete the integration of their national economies into the global economy by removing all existing barriers to the free flow of trade and capital across their borders, focus their own efforts on investing in social and physical infrastructure, eliminate labor market rigidities (read unions and minimum wage legislation), and allow international market forces to play themselves out locally without government interference. That continued and sustained economic growth is good and feasible is taken in the Bank's report to be self-evident.
It is not our concern here to deal with whether such measures would produce socially beneficial growth in an empty world in which ecological constraints are not at issue. That is no longer more than a hypothetical issue of interest primarily to theoreticians and historians. Our present concern is with the consequences of such policies in a full-world--on the understanding that this is our present and future reality. In a full-world, growth-centered policies that presume to expand the economic pie serve primarily to intensify competition for the finite pool of available ecological resources. In an unregulated market situation such competition has two consequences. Resource control becomes increasingly concentrated in the hands of those with economic power to the exclusion of those without and the gap between rich and poor grows at an accelerating rate. The sustainable limits of resource use will be exceeded, the regenerative capacities of the eco-system will be systematically degraded, and the total real wealth of the society, as defined by its future productive potential, will contract. This is exactly what is now happening and the continued movement toward unregulated global economic integration can only accelerate these trends.
As goods and capital flow freely within an integrated global economy to the locality offering the most immediate prospect for short-term profits, capital transnationalizes, i.e., loses its national identity. Governments lose their ability to regulate and manage their own economies in the public interest and become pitted in a competition among themselves to attract investors by offering the cheapest most compliant labor, the weakest environmental, health and safety standards, the lowest taxes, the most fully developed infrastructure, and the least restricted access to natural resources. Labor loses its bargaining power as workers in high wage countries find themselves competing with those in poorer economies willing to work for subsistence wages. Resources are extracted at well below their true value, and the costs of pollution and toxic dumping are passed onto the community with impunity. Again, these are the forces we see at work throughout the world in Northern, as well as Southern, countries.(4)
Almost as sacred as the belief in growth and free trade is the belief that increased financial flows from North to South are crucial to address the South's social and environmental needs. The urgency of such flows is commonly underlined by pointing out that currently there is a negative capital flow of some $50 to $60 billion per year from South to North. Financial flows, irrespective of direction, mask more fundamental underlying realities. These include the fact that many projects funded with foreign assistance have been overly expensive, have not worked at all or worked badly; and many--even those labeled environmental projects--have had detrimental social and environmental consequences. More important, however, is the fact that most development assistance agencies are actively promoting a development model that in the current context serves mainly the interests of transnational capital and its allies among the elites of the South and is the very antithesis of sustainable, people-centered development. Finally a substantial portion of aid is in the form of loans, which adds to the international indebtedness that allows international agencies to dictate the economic policies of borrowing countries in line with their view of the world and its interests.
Foreign investment is no better. In an integrated global economy investors are attracted by such features as cheap labor, tax concessions, low environmental standards, and the willingness of government to debt finance infrastructure facilities--essentially a public subsidy to the investor. The investors themselves remain without roots in the community and may move elsewhere with their jobs, technology, and market access at any time another country offers more attractive terms. Attracting free floating international capital may provide a temporary economic spurt, but this should not be confused with development--which is a process by which a community or country develops the capacity to manage its own resources in a sustainable way to meet the needs of its own people.
The success of Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea--though seldom noted by the advocates of the newly industrializing country (NIC) model--involving strong, protected domestic markets, gaining control over technology, and building their own domestic capital base and entrepreneurial capability. They at no time demonstrated an interest in turning their domestic economies over to footloose international capital.
What prevailing aid and investment policies both mask is the reality that the poverty of the South is not a consequence of inadequate financial flows from the North, it is a consequence of an unbalanced system of international economic relationships that allows the North to extract a substantial portion of the South's share of the world's ecological resources to support its wasteful lifestyles.
This imbalance is sustained in part by the North's ability to press Southern countries to gear their economies to the export of basic commodities, thus intensifying competition and driving down the prices of such commodities in international markets. They are then encouraged to spend their earnings on manufactured products from the North, the prices of which are held high by the North's control of the intellectual property rights to their technological content.
In large measure, the North's aid and investment policies have the effect of increasing the South's dependence on foreign technology and investment without transferring its control. This dependence then allows the aid and investment sending countries to dictate the unilateral removal of trade and investment barriers by recipients--as a condition of continued financial flows--without corresponding concessions by the sending countries.
An appropriate sustainable development agenda for Southern countries, as growing numbers of Southern grassroots organizations are coming to realize, would concentrate on regaining control of their remaining ecological resources to meet domestic needs--beginning with food, clothing, shelter and basic social services. With few exceptions this is within their means--if their resources are properly organized and used. However, they will need to reduce dependence on conventional forms of aid; eliminate long-term international borrowing; reduce export dependence, military spending, and arms imports; demand the freest possible access to beneficial technologies controlled by the North; repudiate odious debts that involved fraud and the misuse of public funds for private gain, or shift the repayment of obligations to the individuals who benefited (see Adams, 1991); negotiate a significant reduction or cancellation of remaining long-term debt; bring population growth under control; and radically restructure the allocation of available resources and assets.
The North has an obligation, as well as a survival need, to facilitate these adjustments. First and foremost it must drastically reduce its dependence on the South's ecological resources and learn to live within its own means. This will include working to restructure the international trade and financial system to return to Southern countries control over their own economies and to price environmental resources at full cost levels in international markets. The North cannot return to the South the wealth it has already consumed. It can make partial restitution, however, by transferring the rights, knowledge and skills required to make full use of the North's store of beneficial technologies.
North and South must work together to create a fair and balanced international trading system, facilitate the widest possible sharing and access to beneficial technologies, encourage broadly distributed local control of capital, and establish an interlinked system of self-managing, locally controlled, democratically governed, and ecologically self-reliant local economies that provide for the fullest human development--but not the wasteful consumption--of their members. There must also be cooperative action toward the collective regulation of transnational corporations to enforce anti-trust measures, assure adherence to local and international social and environmental standards, and the collection of taxes by appropriate authorities.
These will not be easy or simple changes. Willis Harman has written that "...the Copernican revolution amounted to a successful challenge to the entire system of ancient authority..." (Harman, 1988, p. 7). The ecological revolution presents a similar challenge to many of the most powerful of contemporary institutions--which remain resolutely committed to the system of belief underlying their authority. In the end, however, they cannot survive the destruction of the society on which they depend any more than that society can survive the destruction of the ecosystem on which it depends.
The issues that define the ecological revolution's heresies have not yet found their way onto the agenda of the UN Conference on Environment and Development to be held in Brazil in June 1992. Indeed there are powerful interests, including the U.S. delegation to UNCED, intent on assuring that they do not. Consequently, while UNCED may produce some important agreements, it will almost certainly fall far short of confronting the real issues of sustainable development and the profound changes that our global economic system must undergo if we are to reverse our current course toward accelerating social and ecological disintegration. It is imperative that the many citizen groups engaged in the parallel '92 Global Forum bring public attention to the more fundamental issues that UNCED most likely will not air and project them into the broader public debate.
References
Adams, P., Odious Debts: Loose Lending, Corruption, and the Third World's Environmental Legacy, London, Earthscan Publications (1991).Brown, L. R. et. al., State of the World 1991, New York, W. W. Norton (1991).
Daly, H., "Sustainable Growth: An Impossibility Theorem," Development, 3/4 (1990), pp. 45-47.
Daly, H. and J. Cobb, Jr., For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, the Environment and a Sustainable Future, Boston, Beacon Press (1989).
Durning, A., "How Much is Enough?" in Lester R. Brown et. al, State of the World 1991, New York, W. W. Norton (1991), pp. 153-188.
Goodland, R., H. Daly, and S. El Serafy, Environmentally Sustainable Economic Development: Building on Brundtland, Washington, D.C., Environment Department, World Bank, Washington, D.C. (July 1991).
Harman, W. W., Global Mind Change: The Promise of the Last Years of the Twentieth Century, Indianapolis, Knowledge Systems, Inc. (1988).
Renner, M., "Assessing the Military's War on the Environment," in Lester R. Brown et. al. State of the World 1991, New York, W. W. Norton (1991), pp. 132-152.
NOTES
1. . This section draws extensively on Goodland, Daly, and El Serafy.
2. . They are being put forward as central themes of the World Bank's World Development Report 1992 now in preparation.
3. . Based on Durning (1991).
4. . For a more complete analysis see Daly and Cobb (1989).