Environmental Capital

I just finished Jared Diamond's Collapse. It's a fine book and a wonderful analysis of how systems (countries/states) make decision that ultimately bring about their downfall.

I'm not going to go into the book here. It's worth reading.

But he does bring out a point I'm going to bring up here. The first and primary one is to turn a common statement around to show its true meaning. The statement (or something like it) goes like this:

We must balance the encomony and the environment.

This statement implies the environment is some sort of luxury that we'll pay for if we can afford it without too much trouble. Diamond turns this around completely: we'll balance the economy if it doesn't cost us our environment. The reasoning he presents (the whole book presents, not only in modern times but in past civilizatiosn as well) is that 1) degrading the environment is the highest cost to society and 2) a functioning environment is necessary to the economy. Underlying this is an old economic argument: don't spend capital. Spend profit. Modern agricultural, energy, etc., is spending capital. When it's gone you're bankrupt. To place it in a more timely category: spending the environmental capital to present consumers with goods is, in effect, a Ponzi scheme.

I very much enjoyed the book-- I've played a little in this arena in one of my previous (unpublished) books. But I want to go a little farther.

The above statement about the economy and the environment purports to be an economic concept. It is nothing but. It is a political statement. As always, politics is theater and political statements are made with an audience in mind. Further, the audience of political statements must be either opponents of the politician or constituents (or potential constituents) of the politician. To rephrase the statement in this light, it becomes:

My constituents will not tolerate the short term costs of paying for the long term recovery of the environment.

Bush's constituents are obvious-- look at his record. Look at what he's doing right now. He wants his constituents to be happy and we can tell by his behavior who his constituents are. Hint: It's not voters.

We must be willing to demand changes to environmental policy. We must be willing to pay for htem.

We must be the constituents to whom politicians must respond.
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Political Links
Naomi Wolf: It can happen here
Bush: So Little Time, So Much Damage

Links of Interest
A Wonderful Waste of Power
Smokers Brain Power Declines Faster with Age
SwarmBots! Attack!
Current Human Evolution
The Inability to Change
Hiccups and Hernias
Coney Island History Project
Environmental Bamboo
Spontaneous Orangutan Whistling
Cretaceous Extinction Redux
Bonobo Hunting
Lighting Up Dark Energy
Breaking Bad

DIY
Paper Reindeer Decorations
Cookies
A Glass Whiteboard
Worm Farm
Green Gift Guide
Build Blocks
Sticky Buns