The Wealth of Nature. John Michael Greer

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THE THREE ECONOMIES

      ONCE AGAIN, we can begin this exploration with Adam Smith. The Wealth of Nations begins with the following sentence: “The annual labor of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessities and conveniences of life.” This same concept, variously phrased, forms one of the least questioned assumptions in modern economics; even most of those who dispute it offer what are at most slight variations — arguing, for example, that the labor of previous years embodied in capital is also crucial to understanding the economic process. Left unrecognized is the crucial fact that the annual labor of a nation would be utterly useless without the goods and services provided free of charge by Nature, which enable labor to be done at all by making human life possible in the first place and by providing all that labor with something to labor on.

      This recognition has not simply been missed by economists; as often as not, it has been flatly rejected. One classic example is David Ricardo (1772–1823), one of Adam Smith’s most influential successors. Ricardo remains a popular figure in economics, not least because his arguments on behalf of free trade arrangements proved to be highly useful to the British Empire in its time, and of course to the American Empire in ours; you can still find his arguments on this subject presented as simple fact in the pages of most freshman economics textbooks.¹ Another of the core elements of Ricardo’s economic theories, though, is the claim that land retains its “original and indestructible” economic value no matter what economic use is made of it.²

      This is an odd claim. Even in the early nineteenth century, when Ricardo originally made it, plenty of people could have set him straight; the fact that bad farming practices could make soil useless for farming was well known in Ricardo’s time, and so was the impact of industrial pollution — though of course we have gained a great deal more bitter experience with both since then. Whatever the reasons for his claim, Ricardo’s ideas concerning land prefigured the way that natural resources have been treated by most economists ever since. This is as true of radical economists as of their capitalist rivals; recent proponents of “green socialism,” for example, might find it useful to reread Marx, who explicitly rejected the idea that the “free gifts of Nature” could have any value at all.³ (The disastrous mistreatment of the environment common under Marxist regimes in the twentieth century was thus not accidental, but a logically necessary outgrowth of Marxist theory.) Nearly the only concession made to the ecological dimensions of economics in the mainstream, and it’s a fairly recent one, is the concept of “externalities” — the recognition that if somebody does something that fouls the environment, other people may suffer a loss of economic value as a result, and might deserve compensation for that.⁴

      Now of course this is true, and Garrett Hardin’s theory of the tragedy of the commons built on that insight to remind us that a society that permits the advantages of ecological abuse to go to individuals, while the costs are shared by the whole society, is effectively subsidizing the destruction of its environment. Still, both the “externalities” argument and the structure Hardin built on it miss the central issues raised by the interface between the environment and economics. Both tacitly accept Ricardo’s fantasy of invulnerable land as the normal state of affairs, apply it to the entire environment, and then focus attention on those supposedly exceptional situations when somebody does manage to make land (or some other environmental resource) less valuable.

      To show where this thinking falls short, let’s take a closer look at the land whose value Ricardo considered “indestructible.” He was talking primarily about land as an economic factor in agriculture, and so shall we. What he apparently did not realize, but every country farmer knew in his time — and ecologists have demonstrated in fine detail in ours — is that fertile land suitable for growing crops does not simply happen. Like anything else of value, it must be made, and once made, it must be maintained. The only thing that sets it apart from the products of human industry is that the vast majority of the labor needed to make and maintain agricultural land is not performed by human beings.

      Soil suitable for crops, after all, is not simply rock dust; pound for pound, it is among the most complex substances in the known universe. A large part of it — in the best soil, well over half — is organic matter, some living, some dead but not yet wholly decayed, some dissolved into organic colloids complex enough to give analytic chemists sleepless nights. All of these are put there by the activity of living beings over long periods of time. Energy and raw materials flow constantly through soil, uniting bacteria, fungi, algae, worms, insects and many other living beings into one of the most intricate ecosystems on Earth. Plants participate СКАЧАТЬ