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I've heard economists boast that their discipline is based on a fundamental human impulse: Selfishness. They claim that we act first out of self-interest. I can agree, depending on how we define self. To some, "self" extends beyond the individual person to include immediate family. Others might include community, an ecosystem or all other species.
I list ecosystem and other species deliberately because we have become a narcissistic, self-indulgent species. We believe we are at the centre of the world, and everything around us is an "opportunity" or "resource" to exploit. Our needs or demands trump all other possibilities.
When faced with a choice of logging or conserving a forest, we focus on the potential economic benefits of logging or not logging. When the economy experiences a downturn, we demand that nature pay for it. We relax pollution standards, increase logging or fishing above sustainable levels, or (as the federal government has decreed) lift the requirement of environmental assessments for new projects.
A fundamentally different perspective on our place in the world is called "biocentrism." In this view, life's diversity encompasses all and we humans are a part of it, deriving everything we need from it. Viewed this way, our survival depends on the health and well-being of the natural world. I believe this view better reflects reality.
The most pernicious aspect of our anthropocentrism has been to elevate economics to the highest priority. We act as if the economy is some kind of natural force that we must all placate or serve in every way possible.
But wait! Some things, like gravity and the speed of light are forces of nature. There's nothing we can do about them except live within the boundaries they delimit.
But the economy, the market, currency -- we created these entities. If they don't work, we should fix them or replace them.
When economists and politicians met in Bretton Woods, Maine, in 1944, they faced a world where war had devastated countrysides, cities, and economies. So they tried to devise solutions. They pegged currency to the American greenback and looked to the twins, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, to get economies going again.
The postwar era saw amazing recovery in Europe and Japan, as well as a roaring U.S. economy based on supplying a cornucopia of consumer goods. But the economic system we've created is fundamentally flawed because it is disconnected from the biosphere in which we live. We cannot afford to ignore these flaws any longer.
Flaw 1: Nature performs all kinds of "services" that we can't duplicate: It removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and returns oxygen; it enriches soil with nitrogen; it transforms sunlight into molecules that we need for energy in our bodies; it degrades the carcasses of dead plants and animals and disperses the atoms and molecules back into the biosphere. And more. We dismiss those services as "externalities" in our economy.
Flaw 2: Economists believe that because there are no limits to human creativity, there need be no limits to the economy. But the economy depends on having healthy people, and health depends on nature's services, which are ignored in economic calculations.
We are witnessing the collision of the economic imperative to grow indefinitely with the finite services that nature performs. It's time to get our perspective and priorities right. It's time for a Bretton Woods II.
-- Science Matters is written by David Suzuki with Faisal Moola. Take David Suzuki's Nature Challenge and learn more at davidsuzuki.org.