Sometimes, when I wander in the natural world, away from human concerns, I sense some sacred balance that will restore itself, a resilience and patience in living systems that will endure the hungers, fears, and gullibility of my civilization.
On the other hand, a part of me weeps almost daily at the reckless dismantling of this miracle into which I – and the entire human experiment – was born.
Witness: Plastic islands in toxic seas. Methane rising from melting permafrost. Creeping deserts, shrinking aquifers, and declining biodiversity. Black sludge lakes in Mordor landscapes delivering deadly crude oil to our shores, risking our marine environments and coastal communities with oil spills. Our bays, inlets, and wild rivers sold to Babylon.
Governments elected to safeguard society sell our natural assets for trinkets to international corporados. Our BC Premier bankrupts our public hydro-electricity company, plunders our province, builds highways across farmland, and is paid with a "green" award and a cosy junket in London.
Well-funded front groups pose as "environmentalists" to deliver corporate talking points. Traditional media, bought, sold, and cowed, hype the status quo and avoid even discussing any of these crimes and betrayals.
With countless environmental groups and governments proposing "sustainability," ecological indicators get worse, forests shrink, fish decline, and Earth's atmosphere heats up. Why? Part of the problem rests with obsolete, erroneous, and fraudulent economic theories that add up to little more than justification for avarice.
In the following pages, we look at certain errors of the old economics and some features of a new, genuinely ecological economics that might help humanity endure. Most thinking people want to offer solutions, but humanity desperately needs a dose of realism to balance the Pollyanna pop optimism that now passes for analysis as it rationalizes the plunder.
Nature itself, its patterns and habits, provides the primary source for authentic answers. Secondly, traditional indigenous people, and modest communities that still honour Earth's wisdom, provide the vision not found in neoclassical economics. Witness the Fraser River Declaration signed by 61 BC First Nations, the Law of Mother Earth established in Bolivia, and The Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth.
In the end, human economics and all human systems will have to return to Earth, to the miracle, to the living systems that co-evolve, self-regulate, and provide the foundational systems for all life, including human society.
Rex Weyler, Cortes Island BC, November 2011
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Guest editor Rex Weyler is a co-founder of Greenpeace International, author, journalist, and ecologist.
[From December/January, 2011 Watershed Sentinel]
