An Economy of Place — Part II
Can we change the existing economic system without collapse?
If you would like to start at the beginning of the series, An Economy of Place Part I starts here. Our Spring 2022 online learning journey Power of Place is open for registration now and starts on April 21st 2022.
In 2019 a gathering of sustainability and CSR directors from the brand sector of business took place in London, attended by Daniel Christian Wahl and Giles Hutchins. The attendees were trying to answer the question: can the existing economic model be transformed into a regenerative economic model? Can they travel side by side while change happens? You could sense from the energy in the room that everyone of the 75 strong group wanted the answer to be ‘yes’. Because the underlying question was clearly — can we survive and continue to do business as the economy changes? What are our pathways to survive and to continue to grow as businesses?
These are important and intelligent questions. They are fundamental to creating the change we need. If people cannot see a way through to a different future, if they do not feel there is a safe path for them in which they can survive and thrive, the tendency is to dig in and resist, desperately wanting to cling on to the old way which — even if destructive — gives them a sense of security.
The challenge for CEOs, leaders and policy makers is to answer the question with the knowledge we have, without creating or allowing social chaos to be the result, if the answer is not what people want to hear.
So. Can we change the existing economic system without collapse of both economic, social, political and ecological systems? And what is the role of place?
What kind of information do we need to make that decision? Or to think about it differently — what information do we have that we can trust to help us make that decision? Here we could get into a whole discussion about the pollution of the information ecology and if you would like to, watch Daniel Schmachtenberger’s The War on Sensemaking for a good start.
But let’s assume for the purposes of this paper that information has to be from a source that is as unbiased and uninfluenced by the structures of business-as-usual as possible, to be considered reliable. We know that wholly unbiased is incredible difficult for humans because we all carry our own worldview and opinions with us. We know that large swathes of ‘scientific reports’ are funded by global corporations who have a deep interest in the continuance of the extractive economy. So that deletes a lot. What is left is what we can extrapolate from the following:-
- what we know about scenarios for climate change
- what we know from anthropology about civilisation collapse
- what we know about earth systems science and collapse
What are the future scenarios for life on planet earth?
Life has existed on planet earth for 3.8 billion years so it seems a little silly to consider that life may not always continue — at least in some form. The origin of life on earth is incompletely explained by either modern science or religious institutions — however hard they have tried. To the limit of current existing human knowledge, the building block of life is matter which occupies space and has mass. Elements are unique forms of matter. The most prevalent elements in living organisms include carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, sulphur, and phosphorus. These form the nucleic acids, proteins, carbohydrates, and lipids that are the fundamental components of living matter.
Life on earth currently takes an enormous diversity of forms. Green matter — grasses, plants and trees — that utilise solar energy, water and carbon dioxide to grow. Humans who breathe air and consume water, and organic matter from green stuff to animals to reproduce and thrive. Bacteria near mid-oceanic ridges at the ocean floor use sulfur-based chemicals and/or geothermal heat to grow and reproduce in darkness.
At best science can only agree that living organisms are things that reproduce and evolve through natural selection (Darwinian), and that living organisms extract and organise energy and material from their natural environment in order to reproduce and grow.
Our imagination can offer any amount of utopian and dystopian futures, but ultimately the future of life on earth will be will be determined by the actions we take today and for the next few generations. Possible scenarios include:-
No life whatsoever on planet earth; a dead planet. Human civilisation and all other life forms wiped out by a combination of radical shift in runaway climate change, biodiversity collapse , soil and water health collapse or a nuclear winter.
HotHouse earth; where climate change, land use change, biodiversity loss and damage to soil and water cause conditions in temperatures rise an average of 4–7C above current temperatures which in a large percentage of the human and other species die off due to lack of life support systems. Documented by the Stockholm Resilience Centre and authors such David Wallace-Wells in Uninhabitable Earth.
IPCC Earth — which, if you can delve through the reports, predict a rise in global temperatures of somewhere between 1.5C and 3–4.C still bringing massive global disruption in its wake but not as desperate as HotHouse earth
Paris Agreement Accord — in which the nations of the world unite and halt emissions, keeping the global temperature somewhere between 1.5–2C above what is considered pre-industrial era.
Current strategies to achieve even the most basic of these aims — the Paris Agreement — range from a radical reduction in carbon emissions, carbon capture, a transition to renewable energy-based society away from fossil-fuels, a shift from mere sustainability to the circular economy where we re-use what has already been extracted and ideally extract no further, regenerative agriculture and forestry, and the emergent well-being economy which takes into account the human experience. So far, despite all efforts, they’re not making a dent in emissions which are still rising.
We know that the March 2020 lockdown reduced emissions in the UK by 31%, and world-wide by about 17%. The overall prediction for emissions drop in 2020 at that time was 7%, full data is not yet in. The main sources of that reduction were aviation 60%, surface transport 36%, industry 19%, power 7%, public use 21%. Residential output increased by 3% with many more people at home in the colder month of March and early April in the global North but that slowed as soon as the Spring/Summer temperatures rose. Even with that significant drop, it would still not be enough to bring us on track to the Paris Agreement targets and required a shut down of major global economies the effects of which are undoubtedly going to play out over the next decades.
We know a lot about civilisation collapse. We have many examples that have gone before us, and we have more science and technology than any other human civilisation in history to tell us what the patterns of collapse look like. Rise and fall of civilisations runs in six main stages. From the Age of Pioneers to the Age of Decadence in which, after a long period of wealth and power, Sir John established that all empires decline in this pattern. “Frivolity, aestheticism, hedonism, cynicism, pessimism, narcissism, consumerism, materialism, nihilism, fatalism, fanatics and other negative behaviours and attitudes suffuse the population. Politics is increasingly corrupt, life increasingly unjust. A cabal of insiders accrues wealth and power at the expense of the citizens, fostering a fatal opposition of interests between haves and have nots. The majority lives for bread and circuses (panem et circusem); they worship celebrities instead of divinities…. throw off social and moral restraints — especially sexuality; shirk duties but insist on entitlements.”
We also know that there are common factors that influence the decline of civilisations. They are brought about primarily by complex system failures. They include natural and human-induced climate change, environmental resource depletion, invasion by hostile forces, loss of connections to local neighbours, failure of religion or faith system, increasing polarities in social systems causing increasing injustice, loss of core human virtues. If you have been watching recent events in America, all of these may sound familiar.
Earth systems science is a relatively young science which is a collection of over 150 different sciences including ecology, economics, geography, geology, glaciology, meteorology, oceanography, climatology, paleontology, sociology, and space science. These sciences can tell us a great deal about our current circumstances. For example we know
- that when dynamic complex systems change from one state or behaviour to another — called a phase transition or shift — that the previous order has to collapse before a new order arises
- how much CO2 we have pumped into the atmosphere and the conditions of the earth when we last had this level of concentrated Co2 in the atmosphere — the Pliocene era
- the impact of population growth on biodiversity loss as an indirect driver of change
In respect of phase transitions, nature, chemistry, palaeontology and other disciplines give us many examples of how this works. The changing nature of water is one: from water to solid water to ice. The nature of water has to collapse into something different to become ice. The changing nature of a caterpillar to a butterfly, activated by imaginal cells, produces two creatures with totally different DNA from one living entity, but the first has to collapse. Shifts from different geological ages, such as the loss of the dinosaurs was also accompanied by the collapse of the existing life support systems — albeit a collapse caused by an external planetary factor.
In respect of CO2 in the atmosphere, we know that the concentration level is 412ppm — up from 227ppm in 1754. We know that despite lockdown in 2020 we still emitted 37.5 billion tonnes of CO2 and that is certainly temporary as economies struggle to recover in 2021. In 2020, Global Carbon Project researchers estimated the oceans soaked up some nine billion tonnes of CO2 while land absorbed around 13 billion tonnes. Ultimately, when accounting for CO2 also released from land (largely from deforestation), some 19 billion tonnes will be left.
We know that there is a direct correlation between the exponential growth in human population on planet earth and biodiversity decline. The trajectories of change track one another almost in complete synchronicity, and we can infer therefore that human population increase and its activity is the direct cause of biodiversity decline. As population grew, species collapse was already happening for biodiversity as far back as the mid 20th century. It’s not a new phenomenon, it has just accelerated in the past two decades, it’s still happening and it will continue to happen into the future. We know a lot more about how soil has become eroded and depleted, how oceans are acidifying, how rivers and air are polluted, and the impact of deforestation.
We know that have become better and better at creating statistical scenarios of future change, thanks to our development of exponential computer tech, although we are not capable of predicting precisely how and where events will happen or scenarios unfold. All ensemble forecasts and planetary modelling predicted a global viral pandemic, most highlighting it as the greatest threat to the global economy. They could suggest that a primary source of risk was deforestation of habitat, allowing for the potential of species transference. What they could not say was precisely how it would happen (a leap from bats to humans through wet markets), where it would happen (Wuhan, China), or when it would happen (2019–20).
In Donella Meadows Limits To Growth, first published in 1972, they attempted to answer the questions:
- Can the growth rates of population and capital be physically sustained in the world?
- How many people can be provided for on this earth, at what level of wealth, and for how long?
At the time they were not looking at the effects of climate change, soil erosion, deforestation, ocean acidification. They were simply trying to answer the equation about whether the systems in the world that provide the physical support for between population and economic growth were sustainable. Using a modelling system known as the world model, they explored the limits to growth from a number of resource perspectives; available natural resources, population growth, capital, pollution/waste and food production, all of which are closely interconnected. Here are some of the key findings from 50 years ago.
Their prediction for available land use for food production on the basis of economic and population projections at the time would be that available land use for food would be critical by 2000 unless additional land was cleared and fertilised for food production. They noted that these projections could be affected by 30 years by intensifying productivity of land, which we know has happened, but we also know the cost of that intensification has been a crash in biodiversity, and water quality from runoff. These projections did not take into account the effect of the demand on fresh water as agriculture increased, which is also a factor, but concluded might be solved through issues of technology such as desalination.
They did look at the impact of the increased use of non-renewable ore and minerals, and fossil fuel extraction required to accelerate food production — which we refer to as the hidden ‘energy’ within the food production system. Predictions concluded that many of the ores and minerals would run out by around 2050 or at best be extremely costly to continue to extract and produce with the resultant knock on effect on economies and other industries who would also require access to and use of non-renewables.
They also calculated the impact of the growth in pollution — including CO2, oxygen loss in oceans, nuclear waste accumulation, toxin levels in fish, and fertiliser concentrations such as DDT in body fat — as a result of economic and population growth. They were pretty accurate on all measures including CO2 emissions suggesting 380ppm by the year 2000 (it was 370ppm).
In the standard execution of the model, based on the assumption there was a 250-year supply of all resources, at 1970 usage rates, they concluded:
“The behavior mode of the system shown is clearly that of overshoot and collapse. In this run the collapse occurs because of nonrenewable resource depletion. The industrial capital stock grows to a level that requires an enormous input of resources. In the very process of that growth it depletes a large fraction of the resource reserves available. As resource prices rise and mines are depleted, more and more capital must be used for obtaining resources, leaving less to be invested for future growth. Finally investment cannot keep up with depreciation, and the industrial base collapses, taking with it the service and agricultural systems, which have become dependent on industrial inputs (such as fertilizers, pesticides, hospital laboratories, computers, and especially energy for mechanization). For a short time the situation is especially serious because population, with the delays inherent in the age structure and the process of social adjustment, keeps rising. Population finally decreases when the death rate is driven upward by lack of food and health services.”
When the system was adjusted to assume that advances in technology could double the amount of resources economically available, they concluded:
“ …the outcome is very similar to that in the standard run. In this case the primary force that stops growth is a sudden increase in the level of pollution, caused by an overloading of the natural absorptive capacity of the environment. The death rate rises abruptly from pollution and from lack of food. At the same time resources are severely depleted, in spite of the doubled amount available, simply because a few more years of exponential growth in industry are sufficient to consume those extra resources.”
When the system was adjusted to assume that advances in technology could increases resources economically available, significantly increase land yield and apply focused birth control policies, utilizing a technological policy in every sector of the world model to circumvent in some way the various limits to growth, they concluded:
“The model system is producing nuclear power, recycling resources, and mining the most remote reserves; withholding as many pollutants as pos-sible; pushing yields from the land to undreamed-of heights; and producing only children who are actively wanted by their parents. The result is still an end to growth before the year 2100. In this case growth is stopped by three simultaneous crises. Overuse of land leads to erosion, and food production drops. Resources are severely depleted by a prosperous world· population (but not as prosperous as the present US popula-tion). Pollution rises, drops, and then rises again dramatically, causing a further decrease in food production and a sudden rise in the death rate. The application of technological solu-tions alone has prolonged the period of population and indus-trial growth, but it has not removed the ultimate limits to that growth.”
What are we to conclude from the information available to us about where we should be placing our design efforts for a regenerative economy?
- Are we designing to alter incrementally the system that we work in?
- Are we designing to fully transform the existing economy to something completely new?
- Are we designing an economy based on scientific future scenarios, and scenario planning that suggest a possible collapse of both social (civilisation) and planetary systems so that future inhabitants prepare for radically different times?
The last bullet point may have made you raise your eyebrow, jump or activate a muscle in your brains that says — dismiss this paper and stop reading right now. I want to be as clear as I can. I am not saying the human race should prepare for extinction or that we are all going to die (although obviously at some point we will). But it is the responsible thing of a regenerative practitioner to consider all the possibilities and come to their own conclusion about where in this one precious life, we want to put our energy and agency.
There are many other data sources you can look at. In my informal PhD which may one day be published as a book Renewal — but unlikely as it is now 250,000 words long and no one reads books over 60,000 words these days. I think even these few considerations must push us at least to the idea of full transformation with the very real possibility in our minds that any of the work we do should also design for some form of collapse this century.
Which brings me to the importance of PLACE. Our next stop in Part 3.
The Economy of Place is a series of articles by Jenny Andersson that are edited parts of her unpublished book Renewal. There are 20 parts to this paper which will be published here in due course. If you would like early notification of future releases, please register at Really Regenerative — Economy of Place.
