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 journeyThe usefulness of planetary supportThe power of vision

The Earth is our Mother

Basis of indigenous beliefLand as a legacy and sacred: a bibleResources of ‘relatives’Respectful gratitudeRespectful 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 appropriationInequalityWar

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 stateThe cowboy or the spacemanBrundtland definitionMore 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 inequalityReclaim 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 workThe quality of work under capitalismThe value of mutualismThe 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-responsibilityDemocracyEqualityEquitySolidaritySocial 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 difficultyProvided 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 Gitksan-Wet’suwet’en

International Justice to Replace War

War to reinforce unjust settlementInjustice of global tradeTrade subsidiarityA new global trading currency based on

carbon dioxide

A capitalist war in Iraq

US dependence on oil Indebtedness of US

corporationsNeed 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

Interest automatically requires growth Money should lubricate economic activity

Graph shows the relative amounts of

money created by the government and

banks

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.