I was having a discussion with a friend recently in which he lamented about the number of gifts his children had received for Christmas. It was January 16th and there were still a few gifts under the tree, not yet unwrapped. He was both embarassed and upset by this. His feeling was that his relatives had overindulged his children, and had unwittingly done more harm than good. The net result of such a bonanza of gifts is that none of the gifts are valued to as great a degree as they should. I have cringed when my own children, upon carelessly breaking a toy have said to me, “It’s okay, Dad. You can just buy another one.” This is not the ethic with which I want them to identify. But I think it’s probably a natural result of our society’s worldview, filtered down through the actions of their parents (i.e. my wife and me), friends, and reinforced by what they see on television and print media.
The philosphopher Martin Heidegger posited that our technological systems reduce all things, including people, to the status of resources, and that this is the fundamental principle from which our entire worldview is constructed. A small amount of thought on this makes it obvious that treating anything simply as a resource is one-dimensional and myopic. That view puts our own short-term needs at the centre of the equation and ignores all others. As an sidenote, I would point out that western religions have done their part to promulgate this view:
And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
— Genesis 1:28, King James version
A natural consequence of treating things as resources is their being emptied of any intrinsic value — that is, of any value not directly beneficial to us. Things have value, we deem, only if we can find a use for them. Things that fall outside of this realm are dispensable and, should we wish, extinguishable. The mosquitoes I spoke about in Don’t Monkey With My Sun are an example of this latter aspect. But while we found no use for the mosquitoes (and they were indeed causing harm to the human population there), they were still an integral and very important part of the local ecosystem of Borneo, as the World Health Organization and the beleagered residents of that island were eventually to discovered.
Resources are symbolically if not actually owned and are therefore assigned value only as we deem fit or necessary. Our entire system appears to be constructed in such a way that the goal at all times is to drive down value in order to bring the next great thing online affordably. It is a requirement of an economic system such as ours that existing things are constantly replaced by new things, even if they are still perfectly functional.
Industrialization and wealth have served to devalue nearly all material things. This has created the systemic conditions that generate the immense amount of material waste by our society. The only way to combat the generation of more waste is to again imbue material things with value. This will happen in, as far as I can tell, one of two ways: Either a) we voluntarily make changes in the way we think and institute measures to generate value in the minds of our citizens, or b) the planet will make those changes for us. In the former case I’m referring to real and substantial change NOW in the way we do things. The problem, of course, is that a lot of people recognize that we’re headed for a cliff. We just don’t know where the brake pedal is. (Also, that a lot of people don’t believe we’re headed for a cliff at all, and are refusing to help find the brake pedal.) In the latter case, I’m referring to what will happen when through our ravenous systems of growth, resources dwindle to the point that things again become difficult to obtain and prices soar to impossible heights. We got a taste of the consequences of this with the recent record high price of oil. In fact, Jeff Rubin argues convincingly in his book Why Your World Is About To Get A Whole Lot Smaller that the price of oil was the real cause of the economic crisis last year, not overleveraging by lending institutions and sub-prime mortgages.
If we don’t find that pedal (and I hate to think about the consequences of that), the car we’re in will plunge to its fiery destruction, and the planet will shrug, heal, and move on as it always has. Make no mistake, the planet is in no danger in either scenario. Sure, it’s feeling ill right now, but life is tenacious and opportunistic. Just as after past meteor strikes have devastated vast quantities of flora and fauna, Earth will recover from our ravages as well.
So, which alternative do you think will play out? Which story do you want to be a part of?