Designing Ecological Habitats - Gaia Education

10 Designing ecological Habitats
volumes of production. The supreme goal in all countries is to raise incomes,
‘living standards’ and the GDP as much as possible, relentlessly, without any
notion of limits; that is, the most important social goal is economic growth.
If we assume a) three per cent per annum economic growth, b) a population
of nine billion, c) all the world’s people rising to the ‘living standards’ we in
the rich world would have in 2070 given three per cent growth, then the total
volume of world economic output would be 60 times as great as it is today.
So even though the present levels of production and consumption are grossly
unsustainable, the determination to have continual increase in income and
economic output will multiply these towards absurdly impossible levels in
coming decades.
This ‘limits to growth’ perspective is essential if we are to understand the
most serious global problems facing us:
1. The environmental problem is basically due to the fact that far too
much producing and consuming is going on, taking too many resources
from Nature and dumping too many wastes into Nature. It cannot be
solved in an economy that is geared to providing ever-rising production,
consumption, ‘living standards’ and GDP.
2. Third World poverty and underdevelopment are inevitable if a few living
in rich countries insist on taking far more of the world’s resources than is
their share. The Third World can never develop to rich world ways, because
there are far too few resources for that (see Note 1).
3. Conflict and war are inevitable if all aspire to rich-world rates of
consumption, and if rich countries insist on never-ending growth on a
planet with limited resources (see Note 2).
Fault 2: It is a Grossly Unjust Society
We in rich countries could not have anywhere near our present ‘living
standards’ if we were not taking far more than our fair share of world
resources. Our per capita consumption of items such as petroleum is around
17 times that of the poorest half of the world’s people. The rich 1/5 of the
world’s people are consuming around 3/4 of the resources produced. Many
people get so little that 850 million are hungry and more than that number
have dangerously dirty water to drink. Three billion live on $2 per day or
less. Conditions for the world’s poorest are deteriorating.
This grotesque injustice is primarily due to the fact that the global
economy operates on market principles. In a market, need is totally irrelevant
and is ignored – things go mostly to those who are richer, because they can
offer more to pay for them. Thus we in rich countries get almost all of the
scarce oil and other resources traded, while billions of people in desperate
need get little or none. This explains why one third of the world’s grain is
fed to animals in rich countries while tens of thousands of children die every
day because they have insufficient food and clean water.
Even more importantly, the market system explains why Third World
development is so very inappropriate to the needs of Third World people.