In our current economy dominated by finance - 25% of the present US economy employing 4% of workers - it is becoming clear to me that the owners of our civilization are shorting the planet. (Shorting is a transaction through which an investor profits if a company or asset declines in value.) Or as Nate Lewis says,
It’s easy to prove, thinking 100 years out, on a risk-adjusted net-present-value basis, that the earth is simply not worth saving. It’s a fully depreciated, four-billion-year-old asset.
In this deplorable, but fully dominant, way of thinking it’s pretty clear that the “salvage value” (which is all a fully depreciated asset is worth) of the earth is pretty meaningless - there isn’t any entity to whom we could sell the planet to recover this value. So it is a stranded salvage value we’re dealing with here. Essentially worthless. As is the future.
Nothing shall stand in the way of the generation of short term profits. Nothing. Not even life on the planet itself.
If you think this is extreme I point you to the activities of the global banking sector.
Is our earth nothing but a dead warehouse of salvageable resources and a waste dump?
Be careful when you answer that question because, if you are a consumer; i.e. a member of that 10% of the world’s population that all the frenetic profit-generating activities of resource extraction, transport, manufacturing, advertising and merchandising done by our business-as-usual corporate global economy is focussed upon; then you better be advised that it is your buying of the stuff being sold that is propping the whole shaky thing up.
It is the non-negotiable consumer lifestyle that has enabled the rise of massive joint-stock corporations, those subsidized hothouse flowers, those high maintenance welfare queens, which we support by socializing their depradations upon our land, water, air and communities so that they may shower their executives and stockholders with material riches. These delicate, high maintenance, freeloaders have now become the Masters of our modern civilization. We the people are completely enmeshed within the products and conveniences provided by these profit generating dandies – from the toothpaste we use in the morning, the toilets we flush, the automobiles we ride in, the food we eat, the clothes we wear, … and the jobs from which we get the money to buy all the products that give us life and support our lifestyle.
Sometimes I am cynical about this situation. But I don’t feel it’s productive to beat myself up about this. Anyway, that is a judgement made by others — often to diminish the impact of very real, data-driven concerns. Most of these value terms — like “cynical” — describe impermanent states of being and perceiving. And defining those states with certain specific terms like “cynical” or “hopeful” misses the subtleties of the actual experience of them.
Reducing complex human social behavior to either/or equations misses much of the subtlety and just plain orneryness of real human interactions. Ronald Reagan had a very popular optimistic view of America:
We, the present-day Americans, are not given to looking backward. In this blessed land, there is always a better tomorrow… we believed then and now there are no limits to growth and human progress when men and women are free to follow their dreams.
His “Morning in America” ad campaign was one of the most successful ever because of this optimism. It beat the crap out of the doom and gloom “cynicism” of Jimmy Carter, who said this:
Tonight I want to have an unpleasant talk with you about a problem unprecedented in our history. With the exception of preventing war, this is the greatest challenge our country will face during our lifetimes. The energy crisis has not yet overwhelmed us, but it will if we do not act quickly. It is a problem we will not solve in the next few years, and it is likely to get progressively worse through the rest of this century.
Ronald Reagan won. Carter was right. RR was optimistic. Carter was not.
Delusional cheerleading is not helpful. Things are bad, very bad. Nonetheless, we can find things to be grateful in our own personal lives, come from that gratitude, honor our feelings and live our lives in ways that are meaningful to us and make our own, little, contributions to healing according to our own talents.
We need to acknowledge and honor the feelings that arise in us from reality as presented to us by the facts on the ground – feelings like despair, anger, outrage and, yes, even cynicism – without shame, knowing that those feelings arise from our love and connectedness to each other and to this planet we all share .
My answer to that earlier question above is a resounding “NO!” But, again, as I say, it’s not so simple.
In my mind the earth is my mother; a living, breathing, wholly sacred miracle to be cherished and sustained and to be treated with the utmost respect. But my answer, if everyone - most especially the 10% consumer class - actually did more than mouth some kind of hand waving agreement with it and actually practiced the lifestyle such an answer requires, would lead to the complete dismantling of our current system of short-term financialized profit-generation that treats our planet as a fully depreciated asset having only salvage value. This would be a serious disruption to business-as-usual; a lot of jobs would be lost — even if they were jobs involved in the dismantlement of our planet, their loss would cause many families to suffer.
Caught between a rock and a hard place with life as we know it on our planet in the balance.