Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

82 S politics and governance
Box 2.2. (continued)
goes on to say, “We need an ecological worldview; noble intentions
and a modicum of ecological information will not suffi ce”
(p. 12). Each ratchet upward of human population and dominance
required the diversion of “some fraction of the earth’s life-supporting
capacity from supporting other kinds of life to supporting our
kind” (p. 27). Eventually, the method of enlarging our estate by
expanding into unoccupied lands gave way to industrialization and
drawing down ancient ecological capital. “The myth of limitlessness
dominated people’s minds” to the point where we have nearly
trapped ourselves (p. 29). For Catton, we are caught in an irony of
epic proportions: “The very aspect of human nature that enabled
Homo sapiens to become the dominant species in all of nature was
also what made human dominance precarious at best, and perhaps
inexorably self-defeating” (p. 153).
Nobel Prize–winning chemist and economic theorist Frederick
Soddy made a similar point in Wealth, Virtual Wealth, and Debt
(1926), arguing that: “Debts are subject to the laws of mathematics
rather than physics. Unlike wealth, which is subject to the laws
of thermodynamics, debts do not rot with old age and are not
consumed in the process of living. On the contrary, they grow at
so much per cent per annum, by the well-known mathematical
laws of simple and compound interest” (quoted in Daly, Beyond
Growth, 1996, p. 178).
“Debt,” in Herman Daly’s words, “can endure forever;
wealth cannot, because its physical dimension is subject to the
destructive force of entropy” (p. 179). As a result, Daly continues,
“The positive feedback of compound interest must be
offset by counteracting forces of debt repudiation, such as infl ation,
bankruptcy, or confi scatory taxation, all of which breed
violence” (p. 179). The growth of the money economy in reality
represented the expansion of claims (debt) against a stable
or now diminishing stock called nature. As the economy grew,
what we call wealth represented only a growing number of
claims against a fi nite stock of soil, forests, wildlife, resources, and
land, and hence was the source of long-term infl ation and ruin.