The Earth is our Mother

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The Earth is our Mother

• What are the Economic Implications?

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This Earth is precious. Teach your children what
we taught our children. The Earth is our Mother.
The Earth does not belong to man man belongs to
the Earth. Every part of this Earth is sacred
because everything is connected, like the blood
which unites one body. Trees, air, water,
animals, grass, Earth are like many fine strands
that weave the web of life men are merely a
strand of it. Respect your Mother because
whatever befalls the Earth soon befalls the sons
of the Earth. Chief Seattle, 1855
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Ethical or Religious Basis?

• Is religion helpful?
• What is ecofeminism?
• Personal spiritual journey
• The usefulness of planetary support
• The power of vision

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The Earth is our Mother

• Basis of indigenous belief
• Land as a legacy and sacred a bible
• Resources of relatives
• Respectful gratitude
• Respectful agriculture not beet and rape

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Ourselves as Brother and Sisters

• Could we accept inequality that leads to 41,000
  deaths of children every day?
• Would we choose the working conditions of
  sweatshops in the South?
• What would be the consequence for conflict and
  war? Islam is only the latest phoney enemy

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Three Fundamental Problems of Capitalism

• Expropriation and appropriation
• Inequality
• War

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The Problems we Need to Solve
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Replacing Progress with Balance

• The shark or the steady state
• The cowboy or the spaceman
• Brundtland definition
• More isnt always better

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What is wrong with GDP?
What is wrong with GDP is quite simple. It only
performs, repeatedly, one simple arithmetic
calculation. It adds. Yet in reality much of what
it adds in fact serves to reduce the quality of
life. It is as if economists have not yet learned
to subtract. The central question we need to ask
about growth is growth of what? No doctor
assumes that a growth of cancer is a good thing.
Yet the costs of crime, ill health, stress,
environmental damage and social breakdown can all
add to economic growth as measured by GDP. Ed
Mayo, New Economics Foundation
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What is not counted?
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Replacing Inequality with Justice

• Does the spread of the market increase wealth?
• What are the consequences of inequality?
• Why capitalism needs inequality
• Reclaim the right to social exclusion

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Does the spread of the market increase wealth?

• World Bank studies suggest that marketisation
  increases inequality
• Adams, 2003 country-based study showed that
  absolute wealth increased but so did inequality
• Milanovic, 2003 inequality increased markedly
  within households and in poorer countries

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The health consequences of inequality

• ONS data show men in class I live 7.4 years long
  than those in class V (women live 5.7 years
  longer)
• A study reported in the BMJ showed that there is
  a negative relationship between the Robin Hood
  Index and longevity across society as a whole

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Inequality harms us all
The paper suggests that that there is a relation
between income distribution and life expectancy.
It concluded that variations between states in
the inequality of income were associated with
increased mortality from several causes. Relative
poverty, i.e. the size of the gap between the
wealthy and less well off, seems to matter in its
own right the greater the gap between the rich
and poor, the lower the average life expectancy.
This association is independent of that between
absolute income and life expectancy. Therefore it
matters, not only how affluent a country is, but
also how economic gains are distributed among its
members.
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Poverty the shame of it!
If at the earlier moment of industrialization the
persistence of poverty could be explained by a
productive capacity only rudimentarily
established, such an excuse is no longer
possible. It becomes clear, therefore, that the
survival of poverty is essential for ideological
and no material reasons. Indeed, the maintenance
of a felt experience of insufficiency is
essential to any capitalist version of
development. Seabrook, J. (2001), Landscapes of
Poverty
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The Right to Social Exclusion
We had expected ruins and resignation, decay and
squalor, but our visit had made us think again
there was a proud neighbourly spirit, vigorous
activity with small building cooperatives
everywhere we saw a flourishing shadow economy.
But at the end of the day, indulging in a bit of
stock-taking, the remark finally slipped out
It's all very well, but, when it comes down to
it, these people are still terribly poor.
Promptly, one of our companions sitffenedNo
somos pobres, somos Tepitanos (We are not poor
people, we are Tepitans) . . . I had to admit to
myself in embarrassment that, quite
involuntarily, the cliches of development
philosophy had triggered my reaction.
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Building the Cooperative Workplace

• Who gains the value of work?
• The freedom not to work
• The quality of work under capitalism
• The value of mutualism
• The role of guilds

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Marxs Surplus Value Hypothesis
The excess of what workers can produce over what
they need to consume. . . Political economists,
including Marx, were concerned with the division
of surplus value between various members of
society. Marx believed that it would be
appropriated by capitalists. Oxford Dictionary
of Economics (Oxford University Press), p. 454.
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Loss of freedom and autonomy

• The concept of wage slavery enclosure of land
  and removal of self-provisioning
• Alienation loss of autonomy partial cause of
  the low-serotonin society

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The values of mutualism

• Self-help and self-responsibility
• Democracy
• Equality
• Equity
• Solidarity
• Social responsibility

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The role of guilds

• Managed the market rather than leaving it free,
  i.e. price and quantity
• Entrepreneurial activities were banned and
  could result in expulsion, e.g. stockpiling.
• Supported members in difficulty
• Provided identity

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Quality not just quantity of work
We are laughed at when we say that work must be
pleasant, but?every one must be pleased with his
work, a meiaeval Muttenberg ordinance says, and
no one shall, while doing nothing appropriate for
himself what others have produced by application
and work, because laws must be a shield for
application and work. Petr Kropotkin, Mutual
Aid, 159-60.
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The inspiration of the earth
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Immanence

• Gaia The meaning of that cloud-speckled
  ocean-blue sphere was made real to me by their
  newly won scientific information about the Earth
  and its sibling planets Mars and Venus. Suddenly,
  as a revelation, I saw the Earth as a living
  planet. The quest to know and understand our
  planet as one that behaves like something alive,
  and which has kept a home for us, has been the
  Grail that beckoned me ever since.

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It came to me suddenly, just like a flash of
enlightenment, that to persist and keep stable,
something must be regulating the atmosphere . . .
My mind was well prepared emotionally and
scientifically and it dawned on me that somehow
life was regulating climate as well as chemistry.
Suddenly the image of the Earth as a living
organism. . . Emerged in my mind. At such
moments, there is no time or place for such
niceties as the qualification of course it is
not aliveit merely behaves as if it
were, Lovelock, The Quest for Gaia
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Interconnectedness

• The story of the pine marten

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Unity-in-diversity

• Wings of the Eagle a story from the
  Gitksan-Wetsuweten

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International Justice to Replace War

• War to reinforce unjust settlement
• Injustice of global trade
• Trade subsidiarity
• A new global trading currency based on carbon
  dioxide

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A capitalist war in Iraq

• US dependence on oil
• Indebtedness of US corporations
• Need to impress global financial institutions of
  power of the hegemon

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The injustice of global trade

• Unjust to each other Ghana, increased its
  exports of cocoa by nearly 80 per cent between
  1986 and 1996 but earned just 2 per cent more in
  return.
• Unsustainable by the planet OECD data show that
  carbon dioxide emissions from Indonesia,
  Malaysia, the Republic of Korea and Thailand
  while they were positively regarded as Asian
  Tigers because of their rapid development
  increased by between 100 and 278 per cent.
• Simms, A. (2000), Collision Course Free Trade's
  Ride on the Global Climate (London New Economics
  Foundation).

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Trade subsidiarity

• Begin with the local only move further afield if
  good is not available locally
• Food, clothes and building materials should be
  available locally
• Luxury goods, e.g. tropical fruit, will increase
  by the cost of transport-related CO2
• Complex goods will increase in price to reflect
  energy intensity of production

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A fair system of global trade

• Need a neutral currency, not a national currency
• Objective is balance, so fees for trade surpluses
  and trade deficits
• EBCU a new currency for trade, based on
  carrying capacity of planet for CO2, and shared
  on a global per capita basis

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A Fair System of Money Creation

• Graph shows the relative amounts of money created
  by the government and banks

• Interest automatically requires growth
• Money should lubricate economic activity

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Religion and capitalism
Modern capitalism is absolutely irreligious,
without internal union, without much public
spirit, often, though not always, a mere
congeries of possessors and pursuers. R. H.
Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, p.
253 To replace capitalism we need a spiritually
grounded vision of a system that respects the
planet as our mother and her people as our
brothers and sisters.