I just finished reading
Jared Diamond's
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Amazon links:
paperback,
hardcover). It it, Diamond continually uses economic metaphors for environmental problems, presumedly to relate the problem to the pro-business types who seem stereotypically most prone to ignoring environmental problems. His favorite is to compare to ecosystems like fisheries and forests to bank accounts that can have a high balance but a low interest rate, and vice versa, primarily to drive home the point that resources from these renewable systems shouldn't be harvested faster than they can replenish themselves. After all, as anyone who is old money will tell you, "Never touch the principal," and that's an idea that influential big money types should be able to relate to.
Though worthy of a diary of it's own, and Search doesn't find any, the book isn't what I seek to discuss. What I want to talk about is a novel idea that probably isn't really all that new but that presents an excellent framing opportunity to use in service of improving our environment. That idea is that the environment is the economy.
I believe that many have already to claimed that environmental issues are economic ones, but this takes things a step further and puts the money economy - the traditional focus of most Conservatives - into proper perspective as just one very small subset of the whole economy, the environment. The separation of the human economy from the environment is an illusion that will, in the future, be viewed as a pathologically false dichotomy.
One way to see the essential unity of the whole Earth is to look at it like some physicists do, as a heat engine. The short and sweet definition of a heat engine: something that takes energy from a heat source, dumps energy to a lower temperature cool place, does useful work, and is not changed significantly in the process. In the case of the Earth the heat source is the sun (~5800 K, 10,000 ºF), the cool place is the rest of the universe (~3 K, -450 ºF), and the useful work is The Environment and its ecosystems, including the human invented money economy.
The comparison warrants more detail than such broad brush strokes, however, because it is instructive to consider how the prototypical heat engine actually works. I present for your consideration the steam engine. In a steam engine water is boiled by the heat source creating steam that is under pressure. The steam then pushes on a turbine or a piston, doing work and cooling down some. The water is then cooled and condensed to be reused in the boiler. The salient features are exactly the ones that characterize all heat engines: energy transfer from hot to cold with useful work extracted in the middle, and a cycle that permits the medium that does the work and transfers the heat to be reused.
Nature is replete with examples of such cycles: chemical cycles - carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, sulfur, hydrogen, and water, etc - and weather - air circulation, daily heating and cooling of the Earth's surface, etc - to name just two classes. Each of these cycles can also be called an economy. A medium of exchange circulates, determining where useful work gets done, that is not changed by the process. Sound familiar? It should - the money economy works exactly this way. The only difference is that it works on the intangible human motivation instead of directly on energy.
Almost everything I have said thus far has, I'm certain, been said or considered elsewhere and is thus not novel. What is novel is that we recognize that these ideas offer us a powerful opportunity to co-opt a concept that Conservatives have invested considerable time and energy into making sacrosanct - that the economy comes first. It also makes plane, as Diamond discusses in Collapse, that the whole "economy or environment" choice is patently false. To that end, we should reframe environmental issues by referring to them as "the broader economy" and eventually, perhaps, just "the economy." Also, always call the stock markets and such "the money sub-economy." This makes possible the accusation that business types who dismiss the broader economy are too focused on the money sub-economy, exposing them as myopic and greedy. What's more, even the human economy is far broader than the money economy - food, transportation, shelter, etc are all more closely linked to the broader economy than the money sub-economy. The simple proof is that they can, and have, exist without a money sub-economy, but a money sub-economy cannot run without the people who depend on the broader economy.
Another interesting possible retort to the whole caring more about spotted fig bug than humans is , "Do not take so lightly the permanent alteration of the economy God has granted us - you meddle lightly with things you do not yet understand." As a scientist I am somewhat uncomfortable with an appeal to "don't play god," but the idea is politically appealing to drive a wedge in the unholy alliance of the elites and the evangelical patsies, and as long as it's understood that it's only irreversible changes that must be taken with extreme caution then it's acceptable. But I digress, and must return to my main point.
To further the takeover will require two things - one, a simple set of sound bite statistics that can represent the health of the broader economy and compete with things like the Dow Jones and GDP; and two, pressure on the media to report them. Critical measurable elements that can contribute to such indices include topsoil, soil fertility, human population, resources consumed per person, etc. Ways of presenting the information in easily understandable form include: time to collapse of a given portion of the broader economy given current usage, maximum sustainable usage given current rates, the current usage, and a forecast of consequences of collapse (esp. forecasts on employment, pay, and prices). I'm sure that people more knowledgeable in such matters could come up with better measures than this, but keep in mind that the goal is to digest it down to something that can be easily reported, even if it's as artificial as the DJIA. Something like the mean time until something collapses, the probable 5 and 10 year impacts on the human sub-economy (like down 5%, up 10%, etc), or who knows what else. The whole idea is to get numbers that are easy to report, easy to understand (up is good, down is bad), and facilitate a transition to people understanding them in terms that they already know.
Naturally, pressure will need to be brought to bear on the media to report such statistics. That would ideally require that they be updated continuously in some way. I don't have a clue how to do this aside from estimates based on watching current events and actual deliveries of commodities combined with what's known about the impact of such commodities.
Final thought: Diamond's main weakness in Collapse is that he seems perfectly comfortable with the idea that Corporations should be amoral profit seekers, restricted to acting within the law. What he seems to fail to realize is that corporate actors have a disproportionate influence on what form the laws take. If corporations are legally required to be amoral and selfish and are allowed to influence the law, disaster is the only possible result. The corporate system itself needs fixing, even in spite of the positive signs Diamond spends a couple of chapters observing, because otherwise the corporations will simply wait for the public mood and focus to change then go right back to being the destructive forces that they have been.