| You are here: Justice >> Financial Crisis, Ecological Crisis | | | | FINANCIAL CRISIS, ECOLOGICAL CRISIS | | | It is widely accepted that the world in general is going through a financial crisis leading on to an economic crisis which could well be as serious as that which followed the Wall Street crash of 1929.
Many banks are left with huge amounts of bad debts—mainly as a result of loans taken out by speculative builders on the assumption that they would be able to sell the buildings at high prices in order to repay the loans.
Alongside the problem of very large bad debts incurred by the banks there is a further problem. It is that many private citizens have incurred large debts, especially by having taken on huge mortgages and through running up large expenditure on their credit cards. Quite a lot of these people have already lost their jobs or are in immediate danger of doing so. Those who are out of work are unable to pay off their debts to banks and building societies—and this compounds the problems of these financial institutions. And, of course, as more and more people become unemployed, governments not only loses the tax they would have paid, but also has to pay them unemployment benefit.
| | | | ECOLOGY | One of the most pressing dangers we now face is that these serious financial and economic difficulties will cause governments and companies and private citizens to fail to pay sufficient attention to a far more serious problem. This is the problem of the very rapid and irreversible damage that is being done to our environment. George Monbiot is one of the most acute chroniclers of what is taking place. He maintains that the present financial and economic crisis is as nothing compared to the ecological crisis that is around the corner. He makes an interesting comparison: so far the financial crisis has caused the loss of between one trillion and one-and-a-half trillion dollars; but deforestation is causing the loss of about three times as much every year (Monbiot in The Guardian 14.10.’08). This loss of what is called ‘nature capital’ is calculated by estimating what it will cost us to live without these forests.
In a later column Monbiot points out that it is now emerging that even the more pessimistic estimates of the rate of global warming of three or four years ago have seriously underestimated it. This means that the targets set by even the more enlightened governments for reducing global warming are far too low. He holds that only immediate and very radical action by governments can now save us from ecological disaster in the near future. Such action is unlikely because the cost would be enormous. But Monbiot cites a report which suggests that the US government has already spent $4.2 trillion dealing with the financial crisis. He asks: ‘Do we want to be remembered as the generation that saved the banks and let the biosphere collapse?’ (Monbiot in The Guardian 25.11.’08; see also his column of 2.12.’08).
| | | | UNSUSTAINABLE BORROWING | The fundamental cause of the financial crisis is that people were encouraged to borrow more than they could repay. And that is exactly what we all have been doing in regard to nature—borrowing unsustainably by using up its resources at a rate at which they cannot be renewed.
The biggest danger at present is that, in looking for a way out of the financial and economic crisis, governments all over the world will exploit the Earth even more rapidly and ruthlessly. This means piling up ever bigger problems for the future—problems which will have to be faced not only by future generations but even by ourselves in the near future.
Already the government of the low-lying Maldives Islands in the Indian Ocean has begun setting aside money to buy living space in Sri Lanka or somewhere else, for its inhabitants. They have to do so because they expect that before long almost all of their whole country will be covered by rising sea-levels.
A document called ‘The Living Planet’ report issued in October 2008 by WWF (The World Wide Fund for Nature) gives us a way of measuring the ‘carbon footprint’ of practically every country in the world, and comparing the different countries with each other (see http://wwf.pl/informacje/publikacje/inne/living_planet_report_2008.pdf); or Google “The Living Planet”). More importantly, it enables us to judge which countries are using up resources more rapidly than they can be replenished and which countries use fewer resources than are available. As one might expect, the so-called ‘developed’ countries are mainly the ones using up the resources too rapidly. The overall conclusion is that within the next twenty years we humans would need two planets to provide for our needs. And of course we only have this one planet called Earth.
| | | | WHAT CAN WE DO? | We tend to feel helpless in the face of the sheer size of the problem, and to ask, ‘what can we do about it?’ In a recent book called "Welcome to the Wisdom of the World", Sister Joan Chittester writes about what she calls ‘the heresy of powerlessness that eats away at our sense of self-confidence and at the same time justifies our growing unconcern.’ She maintains that the key questions are: ‘Are we doing everything we can? And will we do it for as long as it takes?’ (page 24).
However, this still leaves us with the tricky question: what should we do? The reason why this question is tricky is that there is an apparent clash between two opposite approaches.
On the one hand, commonsense tells us that if the resources of the Earth are being used up too rapidly, then we ought to scale down our buying of things that are not really necessary. But, on the other hand, the economists and politicians are telling us that we need to ‘spend our way out of recession’. They tell us that by buying more we are helping to avoid a slump where more people will become unemployed and we will get into a downward spiral.
One does not have to be a genius to see a way out of this apparent dilemma—but I don’t see any of our leaders recommending it, so I shall spell it out by way of a couple of simple examples:
(1) Suppose you are thinking of going on an overseas holiday this year. You could decide to go camping in your own country instead and give the money you save to the St Vincent de Paul Society. They will distribute that money locally and it is very likely that every cent of it will be spent locally, thus helping local employment. Your own spending will also be local. And by not taking an air-trip you will be reducing your ‘carbon footprint’ very significantly and in this way lessening the damage to our fragile Earth.
(2) Suppose you or some friends are accustomed to changing the carpet in the living-room every ten years, at a cost of, say 1000 euro. If you were to delay the carpet replacement for a couple of years that would save 200 euro. If that money were given to the St Vincent de Paul Society it would be spent locally, thus contributing more effectively to the local economy than if it were spent buying an imported carpet. And the delay in replacing the carpet would mean there would be a little less use of energy and a little less global warming. | | | | INDIVIDUALISM | I suppose the reason why this kind of approach is not being recommended by economists or politicians is that they have ‘bought into’ the individualism that is so rampant in the Western world. They assume without question that the dominant concern of each individual is his or her own immediate self-interest. Concern for society, for the poor at local or global level, and for the welfare of the planet as a whole, is assumed to be in a separate compartment which is far down on each individual’s priorities.
In various countries faced with a financial crisis, government ministers have started appealing to people to be generous, to make sacrifices—perhaps even for the well-off to give back 10% or more of their salary. Why does this request evoke such a cynical and inadequate response? Alongside the more obvious reason of selfishness there is also the fact that this request seems quite out of line with the whole thrust of mainstream economic and political thinking. It is as though concern for the welfare of the community as a whole is suddenly being wheeled in ‘out of the blue’ as a kind of deus ex machina in a situation in which it had previously been seen as more-or-less irrelevant. And why is it seen as irrelevant? Because mainstream economists have swallowed the ideological belief that underlies crude capitalism. This is the assumption that the most effective way of ensuring the welfare of all is for each individual to look out for his or her own interests.
| | | | AN ALTERNATIVE VALUE-SYSTEM | What we see here is an almost unbridgeable gap between two different value-systems. On the one hand, there is the traditional outlook which fosters a balance between personal welfare and social and community values. This is an outlook which is central not only to Christianity but also to other religions. In sharp contrast to this is the individualistic set of assumptions and values which underpins the economic system of Western countries—and increasingly of the wider world.
One of our most immediate priorities as Christians is to challenge this individualism. A first step, of course, is to challenge it by our own lifestyle. We need to live out a moderate or even frugal style in the day-to-day choices we make about the way we spend our money.
A second step in challenging individualism is to point out and challenge the way that individualism is being reinforced by the assumptions of economists and politicians. This does not mean nagging at people, blaming them in a moralizing way. That will only antagonize people and evoke a defensive reaction where they will say: ‘Why don’t you Christians put your own house in order before you start preaching at us?’
A far more effective challenge can be mounted by helping people to recognize the very many ways in which they themselves and most ordinary people do in practice act generously, going against their immediate self-interest. Think of the extraordinary generosity of parents, who get up in the middle of the night to look after their children, and deprive themselves of the luxuries they took for granted when they were younger, in order to pay for what their children need. Furthermore, people often give extravagant gifts to their close friends. And lots of people generously devote time and resources to community work or to caring for the poor.
Mainstream economists take little or no account of this kind of activity. This is partly because it is difficult to measure it in terms of money. But I suspect that it is also because this kind of generous activity does not sit easily with the dominant assumption of the capitalist economy that narrow self-interest is the sole motive for human activity—or at least the only one that is worth taking into account.
As Christians we are called to name and celebrate the fact that humans are not isolated, selfish individuals—that there such a reality as society (despite Maggie Thatcher’s denial of this). Having recognized this human solidarity, as well as our partnership with animals and plants as part of the Earth community, our task is to increase people’s sense of solidarity and to expand the extent to which people live it out in daily life. (And of course in doing so we work in partnership with committed people all over the world, many of whom are not Christians.)
We must go on to expect and demand that economists, planners, and politicians devise and implement programmes which value and reward human solidarity—for instance by offering generous support to families and to local and regional communities. It is only in such a context that there is any likelihood that people would respond generously to a government plea to the people to be willing to make sacrifices in order to overcome the financial and economic crisis.
What kind of sacrifices are required? Not just pay pauses and a large reduction in the salaries of high earners plus a smaller reduction in those of a middle income. It is far more important that economists, planners, politicians, and all the rest of us face up realistically and bravely to the looming ecological crisis. It will involve a quite radical change of direction towards a style of development that is environmentally sustainable. In fact we in the Western world need to admit that we have been—and still are—taking far more than our fair share of the limited goods which nature has to offer.
So we must begin to pay back the debt we owe to nature, not only in order to restore ecological balance, but also to allow the poorer peoples of the world to draw their fair share of the energy sources, the fish, the unpolluted air and water, and all the other gifts of nature.
Donal Dorr
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