Reflections from an environmental perspective

Citation

Suzuki, D. (2009), "Reflections from an environmental perspective", Management Decision, Vol. 47 No. 7. https://doi.org/10.1108/md.2009.00147gab.001

Reflections from an environmental perspective

Article Type: Reflections from an environmental perspective From: Management Decision, Volume 47, Issue 7

For two years, the environment and climate have been the number one concern of Canadians, with health a close second. Health and the environment, of course, are the same – we can’t have a healthy population if we don’t have a healthy planet. Businesses have been rushing about trying to green themselves while putting eco in front of everything from eco-architecture to eco-psychology and eco-forestry.

But now with the US subprime mortgage scam exposed and the resultant plunge of global markets, the economy has taken over as top concern, and not because of the prefix. It’s as if the economy and the environment are somehow separate issues with the economy trumping the environment every time. This economic crisis, as the tragedy of 9/11 ought to have been, offers an opportunity to examine some deep issues and assumptions so that we can move to a different path.

The prefix “eco” derives from the Greek word, oikos, meaning home. Ecology is the study of home while economics is its management. Ecologists try to determine the conditions and principles that enable life on this planet to survive and flourish. One would think that people active in any area of endeavour ought to think of those conditions and principles defined by ecologists as the limits within which they operate. But in suggesting, as does Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, that actions to deal with global warming should not undermine the economy, then economics becomes elevated above ecology. We have to put the eco back into economics.

The economy is not an entity that exists according to some kind of universal law like the Second Law of Thermodynamics. We invented it. Long before there was a formal discipline of economics, people lived full lives filled with meaning and purpose. However, we now seem to bow down before the economy, market and currency, as if they are entities beyond question. Examine the way business sections report on the market, currency or the economy as if they are conscious entities (“the market is feeling insecure”, “the dollar is strong”, “the economy needs propping up”, etc.). They are human creations and if there are problems with them, we shouldn’t sacrifice everything simply to placate them.

I believe the problem we face is that the current economic paradigm that has been so successfully globalized is fundamentally flawed and so skewed from reality that nature inevitably pays the price for economic growth. Let me illustrate what I mean. In Canada, especially British Columbia where I live, there have been numerous battles over logging of old growth forests. To the First Nations people who have lived in those ecosystems for millennia, they are “sacred”, a value that has no place within economics because the very word implies beyond economic price or worth.

I once had an argument with the CEO of a forest company that had been given permission by the BC government to log a forest that the First Nations were determined to protect. In frustration, the CEO yelled at me: “Listen Suzuki, are tree huggers like you willing to pay to leave that forest standing? Because if you’re not, those trees have no value until someone cuts them down.”

That was a moment of profound insight for me as I realized in our economic system, he was right, but it was lunacy. So long as those trees are alive and standing, they exchange carbon dioxide for oxygen, not a bad service for animals like us that depend on photosynthesis to create the atmosphere; yet to economists, that is an “externality”, that means “has no value in the economy”. The tree roots cling to the soil so that when it rains, the soil doesn’t erode into the salmon gravels and clog the spawning beds – another externality. The forest pumps thousands of gallons of water from the soil every day, transpiring it into the air to affect weather and climate – an externality. The forest provides habitat to countless species of bacteria, fungi, insects, mammals and birds – still another externality.

So all those services performed by an intact forest are invisible to economists and thus, don’t play a role in discussions about the “value” of the forest. And so it goes with numerous services performed by different ecosystems across the planet. When economist Bob Costanza attempted to internalize those services by estimating the economic cost of their replacement, the total cost came to almost twice the annual GDP of all the economies of the world combined.

We compound the problem by using indicators like GDP that only add and never subtract. Thus, if one lived in a community that was steadily deteriorating, locks, guns and alarm systems installed by a home owner to protect against crime all increase the GDP. A car accident leading to death involves police, tow trucks and ambulances along with nurses, doctors, medicines, insurance payments, flowers, hearses, gravediggers, etc. that all contribute to growth in the GDP. But what does GDP inform us about our well being and quality of life? Yet we seem determined to keep that GDP growing at all costs.

Economists seem to believe that human creativity and productivity are so great that the economy they create can grow forever. Indeed, growth has become the be all and end all of most governments because it has become the very definition of progress. Yet we occupy a finite world – the biosphere – that cannot increase in size and nothing within a finite world can achieve steady growth indefinitely. We are already hitting limits of atmosphere, water, biodiversity and soil on which the entire economy rests.

Everything we produce comes from the biosphere and goes back into it when we are finished. In the rush to maximize economic growth, we ignore limits at our peril. The current rate of consumption of potentially renewable resources is completely unsustainable. A study performed for WWF UK, revealed that it takes 1.3 years for nature to replace renewable resources exploited by all humans in a year, a deficit that has been occurring for at least two decades. In other words, we are using up the biological capital on the planet, rather than exploiting the surplus or interest on that capital.

The great challenge we face is to rediscover our place within the biosphere. The lesson that we gained from Rachel Carson’s seminal book, Silent Spring, is that in nature, everything is connected to everything else. So when we spray pesticides to kill insects, we end up affecting birds, fish and human beings. And if everything is interconnected, then everything we do has repercussions and therefore responsibilities.

Human beings are one species out of perhaps 15 to 30 million other species. It is madness to think that by protecting 12 percent of our land base for all other species as suggested by the Brundtland Commission (1987) then we can take over 88 percent. We are utterly dependent on the productivity and health of the rest of creation and as we drive tens of thousands of other species to extinction, we tear at the web of life and its resilience. As the top predator in the world, we are the most vulnerable to the collapse of that web of interconnections.

Our most fundamental and undeniable need as biological creatures is clean air, clean water, clean soil, clean energy and biodiversity for our very survival and health. It makes no sense for us who care about sustainability to see air, water and soil as a toxic dump while extirpating species at an unprecedented rate.

We are also social animals with fundamental need for love during our upbringing. Children deprived of love are crippled physically and psychically. We need love to know how to love and empathize with our fellow human beings. To maximize that love during childhood, we have to support families and communities with full employment, security, justice, equity and freedom from racism, terror and war.

And as spiritual beings, we need sacred places, a sense of belonging to nature from which we were born and to which we will return at our death. These should form the basis of any society that aspires to happiness, meaning and a sustainable way of living.

David T. Suzuki, Co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation, is an award-winning scientist, environmentalist and broadcaster. The author of 43 books, David Suzuki is recognized as a world leader in sustainable ecology. He lives with his wife, Dr Tara Cullis, and two daughters in Vancouver. Please visit: www.davidsuzuki.org to learn more about the work of Dr Suzuki and the David Suzuki Foundation.