The Wealth of Nature. John Michael Greer

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СКАЧАТЬ water and mineral nutrients from it, and cycle leaves, root fibers and a wide range of chemical compounds back into it.⁵

      The farmer who wants to grow crops is attempting to extract wealth from the underground ecosystem of the soil. She can ignore that, and simply plant and harvest with no attention to the needs of the soil, but if she does, the soil will be depleted of nutrients in a few years and her crops will fail. Alternatively, she can replace nutrients with chemical fertilizers, predators with pesticides, and so on. If she does this she will have to use steadily larger doses of chemicals to get the same yields, and if the society she lives in runs short on petroleum and natural gas feedstocks for these chemicals — as ours shows every sign of doing — she will be left with soil too sterile and pest ridden to grow anything. If she wants to fulfill Ricardo’s promise and hand the land on to her grandchildren in the same condition that she received it from her grandparents, she will have to provide the things the soil needs for its long-term health. Put another way, she will have to barter with the soil, giving it the things it will accept in exchange for crops.

      This is the premise of organic agriculture, of course. It’s a premise that has proven itself in the Asian farming regions that inspired the organic pioneers of the early twentieth century to devise a more general system of agriculture that works with rather than against natural cycles,⁶ and in the farms now using organic methods to get yields roughly comparable to those of chemical agriculture. The organic approach has many dimensions, but one may not have received the importance it deserves. To an organic farmer, land is not a commodity that can be owned but a community with which she interacts, and that community has its own economy on which the farmer’s economy depends.

      Imagine, to develop this concept into a metaphor, that our farmer got her crops, not from her fields, but from the village of an indigenous tribe near her home. The inhabitants of the village are deeply conservative, and their own economy follows traditional patterns not subject to change or negotiation. If the farmer wants crops, she must find out what the villagers are willing to take in exchange for them, and that will be determined by the internal dynamics of the village economy: what is already produced in surplus amounts, what is scarce, what is desired and what is detested by the villagers. Her relations with the village, in other words, would be exactly the same in outline as those of an organic farmer with her land.

      The same thing is true of every other form of economic activity, though the dependence on Nature may be less obvious in some cases than in others. Behind the human activities that produce secondary goods lie a bewildering range of nonhuman activities — the biological cycles that yield soil fertility, crop pollination and countless other things of economic value; the hydrological cycles that put fresh water into reservoirs and taps; the tectonic processes in the crust that put economically useful metals and minerals into veins in the rocks; and, of central importance just now, the extraordinarily complex interplay of biological and geological processes that spent half a billion years storing away countless billions of tons of carbon under the earth’s surface in the form of fossil fuels.

      Conventional economics assumes that these things get there by some materialist equivalent of divine fiat. This disastrously misstates the situation. These natural goods are produced by an exact analogue of the way that secondary goods are produced: raw materials are transformed, through labor, using existing capital and available energy, to produce goods and services of value. The difference is that all this economic activity takes place in the nonhuman world. Human beings do not manage the production of natural goods, and the disastrous results of attempts to do so to date suggest that we probably never will. In at least some cases, however — maltreated farmland is a good example — we can interfere with the production of natural goods, and suffer the consequences when this mismanagement impacts our own economies.

      What must be understood here is that human economic activity is far less independent of the natural world than too many economists try to pretend. The scale of this dependence is as rarely recognized as it is hard to overstate. One of the few attempts to quantify it, an attempt to work out the replacement costs for natural services carried out a few years back by a team headed by heretical economist Robert Costanza, came up with a midrange figure equal to around three times the gross domestic product of all human economic activity on earth.⁷ In other words, out of every dollar of value circulating in the world’s human economies something like 75 cents were provided by natural processes rather than human labor. What’s more, most if not all of that 75 cents of value had to be there in advance for the production of the other 25 cents to be possible at all. Before you can begin farming, for example, you need to have arable soil, water and an adequate growing season, as well as more specialized natural services such as pollination. These are nonnegotiable requirements; if you don’t have them, you can’t farm. The same is true of every other kind of productive work in the human economy: Nature’s contribution comes first, and generally determines how much the human economy can produce.

      The Power of Paradigms

      Unfortunately, these reflections unfold from a way of thinking about the Nature of economic activity that is not shared by most people in the industrial world. The core of that way of thinking, and the focal point of the disagreements that surround it, is the issue of environmental limits. It’s no exaggeration to say that either you believe in these limits or you don’t. If you do, it seems glaringly obvious that modern industrial civilization, which depends on ever-increasing exploitation of finite and nonrenewable resources, is in deep trouble, and the only viable options are those that jettison the fantasy of perpetual growth and aim at a controlled descent to a level of energy and resource use per capita that can be sustained over the long run.

      If you don’t believe in limits, by contrast, such notions are the height of folly. Since, according to this way of thinking, progress can always overcome any limit Nature might impose on human beings, it seems glaringly obvious that modern industrial civilization needs to push progress into overdrive so that it can find and deploy the innovations that will get us past today’s problems and launch our species onward toward its glorious future, whatever that happens to be.

      Disbelief in environmental limits, as it happens, is far more common these days than belief in them. That’s a fascinating twist of fate, because the evidence for the power of environmental limits over human life is overwhelming. Ecologists have documented the myriad ways that environmental limits play a dominant role in shaping the destiny of every species, ours included. Historians have chronicled the fate of many civilizations that believed themselves to be destiny’s darlings, and proceeded to pave the road to collapse with their own ecological mistakes.⁸ From a perspective informed by these facts, the insistence that limits don’t apply to humanity is as good a case study as one might wish of that useful Greek word hubris, defined as the overweening pride of the doomed. Still, this makes it all the more intriguing that the power and relevance of environmental limits are anything but self-evident–to most people in the industrial world today.

      The power of nonrational assumptions in shaping human thought was mapped out decades ago by Thomas Kuhn, whose book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is as famous as it is rarely read. Kuhn was among the first historians of science to put the popular image of scientific progress to the test, and he found it wanting. In place of the notion that science advances toward objective truth by the accumulation of proven facts — a notion that still shapes histories of science written for popular consumption — he showed that scientific beliefs are profoundly shaped by social and cultural forces, and that the relation between scientific theory and the facts on the ground is a great deal more complex than conventional ideas allow.

      Kuhn’s take on things has been misstated often enough that it probably needs a summary here. During a period of what he calls “normal science,” scientists model their work on a paradigm. This isn’t some sort of vague worldview, in the sense too often given to the word; rather, it’s a specific example of science at work, an investigation in a given field by an exemplary scientist and the successful theory resulting from that research. In bacteriology, for example, Louis Pasteur’s research program СКАЧАТЬ