Reasonable men adapt themselves to their environment; unreasonable men try to adapt their environment to themselves. Thus all progress is the result of the efforts of unreasonable men. ~ George Bernard Shaw
Human society has reached a critical pass in relation to its environment. Pollution caused by the rapid increase in the destructive resource-consumption patterns are damaging the integrity of the planetary climate balance that is essential for the survival of civilization. The destruction of the planet, in the sense of making it unusable for human endeavour, has grown to such an extent that it now threatens nature as well as the survival and development of society itself. Our way of thinking ~ both individually and collectively ~ is dominated by short-term perspectives. The climate conventions are not protecting climate, the biodiversity convention is not protecting biodiversity, [and] the desertification convention is not preventing the process. This has been stated by James Gustave Speth in his book, Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment.
We have been sufficiently alerted about what the future may hold, but thus far we have been unable to step out from the path to disaster that has been mapped out for us. In the words of the Nobel Peace Laureate, Albert Schweitzer, “Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall, he will end by destroying the world.”
The economy is an environmental bubble. The economic output is artificially inflated by overconsumption of the earth’s natural assets. With each day, our demands on the earth exceed its regenerative capacity increases by a wider margin. Nature’s benevolence is fast dying because of human avarice. The litany of ecological crises include overpopulation, climate change, devastation of ocean fisheries, contamination of ground water, deforestation in the tropics, loss of genetic diversity, erosion of fertile topsoil, the depletion of nonrenewable resources and other unwanted processes that are occurring at unsustainable rates and frightening scale and pace.
India today is an environmental basket-case, marked by polluted skies, dead rivers, failing water-tables, ever-increasing amounts of untreated wastes, disappearing forests and so on. Global environmental changes entail a degree of uncertainty and many unintended effects not previously encountered. Scientists deal with the uncertainty with their concept of critical thresholds. The transformation of the earth has now reached the point at which there is increasing likelihood of overshooting the critical thresholds associated with the finite nature of ecosphere, with disastrous results for life on earth. By the time the consequences are appropriately realized, it may be too late to reverse or repair the damage because the dynamics of ecosystems do not obey the linear orderliness of physical systems. Instead, they are influenced by feedback loops and critical loads. According to the prestigious Worldwatch Institute, we have only four decades left in which to resolve our major environmental problems if we are to avoid irreversible ecological decline.
Indeed, the crisis of the earth is not a crisis of nature but an unsustainable relationship between nature and society. The prime factors behind the environmental destruction are not biological or the product of individual choice. The reasons are social and historical, rooted in productive relations and technological imperatives. The illusion of unlimited power, nourished by scientific and technological achievements, has resulted in our failure to distinguish between income and capital. In the words of E.F. Schumacher, “the cardinal error of our whole industrial way of life is the way in which we continue to treat irreplaceable natural capita as income.” Rather than treating himself as a part of nature, we treat nature as if it were a business in liquidation.
One major assumption of conventional economics is that there are no limits imposed by nature. ‘Externalities’ such as pollution are minor and inconsequential. In the heyday of classical economics, these premises were partly true. The truth ~ or at least a better starting point ~ is that nature is now the scarcest economic factor. The ‘externalities’ are now large and consequential, and accumulation leads to little happiness. Yet, in the face of these obvious changes, economists cling to the delusion that their old assumptions continue to work. As John Kenneth Galbraith had remarked, ‘the shortcomings of economics are not original errors but uncorrected obsolescence.’
The universal urge for higher incomes in the face of mounting environmental destruction has heightened the tension caused by rapid growth and environmental protection. The widely held perception of a trade-off between the two objectives rests on the perception that environmental protection, not environmental degradation, is the impediment to rapid growth.
A primary praxis to measure economic growth ~ gross domestic product, or GDP ~ is based on absurd calculations that exclude distribution of income, the relentless depletion of essential resources, and ignore the existence of ‘externalities’ ~ the reckless spewing of harmful waste into the atmosphere, waterbodies and biosphere. In fact, we are facing a twin crisis ~ economic and environmental ~ and the two are closely interlinked. Though many experts believe that GDP is the simplest and most accurate measure of whether economic policy is moving in the right direction, the Nobel economics laureate, Simon Smith Kuznets, who had first developed the modern concept of GDP, had warned as early as 1937 that it was a potentially dangerous oversimplification, one that could be misleading and subject to ‘illusion and resulting abuse’ because it did not account for ‘the personal distribution of incomes’ or ‘a variety of costs that must be recognized.’
In general, well-being has been undermined in parallel with affluence. To redefine progress, we need to calculate the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) for every year. In fact, it is a derivative of GDP. It features several aspects that the GDP excludes, such as the value of unpaid household labour and voluntary work. The measurement of progress is different. While GDP keeps rising, GPI starts to fall. The implications of GPI are farreaching. In economic jargon, we may have reached a point of negative marginal return. Human activities are disrupting the great ecological systems and natural cycles that make our planet habitable, bountiful, and wondrous. Today’s pertinent question is: ‘Can the world be saved?
The unsustainable way of life can hardly be sustained without ecological collapse. The Living Planet Report 2004 of World Wildlife Fund stated: ‘If everyone enjoyed the lifestyle of the average West European, we would need three planet earths.’ The greatest challenge of the 21st century is to maintain a harmonious existence of mankind and nature that presupposes an approach based on equity and justice and co-existence of all cultures and civilizations. In 1911, Mahatma Gandhi used the phrase, ‘Economy of Nature’ which brings out the sensitivity and deeper understanding of human action vis-à-vis ecology. The challenge ahead is huge. In the words of Al Gore, Nobel Peace Laureate and Former US Vice-President, ‘The struggle to save the global environment is in one way much more difficult than the struggle to vanquish Hitler, for this time the war is with ourselves. We are the enemy, just as we have only ourselves as allies.’