Sustainability, Peace, Justice, and the United Nations
-Dr. James M. Skelly
PART I
Introduction
I greatly appreciate the opportunity to speak with all of you today not least because your presence here and our common concerns give me some degree of hope in the face of circumstances that seem to threaten the very survival of our species. I was reminded of this a few weeks ago at a conference in Budapest when I heard the following story informed by the dark humor common to Central Europe.
Two planets who haven’t seen each other for some time meet up in space somewhere near the Crab Nebula, and one says to the other, “It’s been a longtime – how are you?” After some hesitation, the other planet says, “Well – not so good.” “Why? What’s the matter?” says the first planet. The other replies after further hesitation and with some embarrassment, “I have homo sapiens.” “Oh!,” the first planet says, “Don’t worry! It doesn’t last long.”
I actually hope our habitation of the planet does in fact last for a very long time, but as everyone here today intuits, I think, we have to change the way we’re living on our planet if that’s to be the case. For much of my adult life, I have been engaged both as an activist and as an academic with how we might create a more peaceful world – this “career,” if you will, started with my refusal as a military officer to serve in Vietnam and my subsequent lawsuit against the United States Secretary of Defense. One consequence of this was that up until several years ago, the focus of my work was on how to create peace among peoples, but what I have unfortunately come to realize is that throughout human history we have not only been making war on other members of our species, but also warring on all other species, and the planet itself.
This orientation toward war has its roots in a fundamental illusion that is unfortunately common to humankind – the illusion that separate and discreet places on this planet can be created as secure utopias. Whether it’s our own modest house, or immodest castle with a large estate, or even a country like the United States, we somehow think that we can find our own private solutions to the challenges life brings us without acknowledging our interconnectedness to other humans, and other species, as well as our dependence upon this living entity we inhabit, called “Earth.”
Our illusions are one of the primary reasons that we do not see the fundamental threats that are confronting the human species. As a species, we’re in deep trouble – very deep trouble! But the vast majority of people are either unable or don’t want to “connect the dots” – although we all hear a great deal about the threat of climate change, most people don’t want to confront the fact that it is our entire way of living that is implicated, and that the various discreet aspects of our way of life are connected to the massive problems our species faces. Put simply, our lifestyles are not only unsustainable, they also threaten the survival of humanity as a whole.
How is it that we came to have a way of living that is not sustainable, and threatens the future of the human species? The problem clearly has deep roots in tribalism and the fact that humans tend to be carnivorous, as the scientists James Lovelock and E. O. Wilson suggest. Wilson wonders whether humanity might be suicidal, and argues that the evolution of humans made life problematic for other species, as well as the planet:
“It was a misfortune for the living world in particular, many of our scientists believe, that a carnivorous primate and not some more benign form of animal made the breakthrough. Our species retains hereditary traits that add greatly to our destructive impact. We are tribal and aggressively territorial, intent on private space beyond minimal requirements and oriented by selfish sexual and reproductive drives. Cooperation beyond the family and tribal levels comes hard. Worse, our liking for meat causes us to use the Sun's energy at low efficiency.”
These very tendencies however have been exacerbated by our forms of economic and social organization, and their accompanying cultural practices, since the advent of the Industrial Revolution 250 years ago. Although the current economic crisis has presented us with an opportunity to rethink our ways of organizing our economies and societies, our cultural socialization to an over-determined sense of individuality realized through consumerism seems destined to continue. Policy makers seem incapable of imagining an economic system that is not constructed around the idea of economic growth and ever more profligate consumption. And for the most part we ourselves are seduced by the images of the “good life” that the industries promoting consumption support.
Planned and Perceived Obsolescence
In the immediate aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001, then US President Bush declared a full scale “war on terror.” In all previous wars throughout history, the inclination of ordinary citizens had been to save money and other resources because of the threat of scarcity that the destructive forces of war bring. People become very careful about expenditures. Mr. Bush however, urged people not to be afraid and to go back to the shopping malls. Why? Because “shopping” is almost a patriotic duty in the United States since two-thirds of US economic activity is built around consumerism. Without excessive consumption, the economic system would collapse, as it has nearly done now. And as everyone here will understand, many of the items consumed are not necessities, but things we have learned to need but really don’t.
In addition to things we do not need, there are things we must consume because older versions are no longer functional. This is due to the fact that one of the solutions to the fundamental challenges that capitalism faced in the 20th century was to insure that things did not work forever because otherwise economic growth could not be sustained once the basic needs of people had been met. As the Chairman of President Eisenhower’s Council of Economic Advisors said in the 1950’s, “The American economy’s ultimate purpose is to produce more consumer goods.”
When I was a child therefore, I remember my father lamenting that “cars are not what they once were” – he remembered when cars were meant to last forever, if one took care of them. But beginning in the period after World War II, car manufacturers built vehicles that were meant to become functionally obsolete in five years. Planned obsolescence insured that people would need to buy a new car regularly, and thus, the imperatives of an economy built around continued economic growth were sustained. In my lifetime, for example, I have owned nine different cars – on average, one every five years since I have been driving – I’m a good consumer! If you use computers, you might ask how often they become obsolete and need to be completely replaced, rather than repaired or up-graded? How often have you replaced your mobile telephones?
A leading economic analyst in the post-War period, Victor Lebow, captured what happened in American society, and since then has been spread throughout the world – Lebow said: “Our enormously productive economy . . . demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption . . . we need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.”
We are also victims of the other cultural engine for economic growth – perceived obsolescence. Perceived obsolescence is the cultural perspective that encourages us to buy things we don’t need because we think the things we have are old, or no longer fashionable, and therefore we enhance our personal identity by buying something new and in some cases, “trendy.” Psychologically, personal identity is therefore increasingly tied to questions about appearance, or the “surface” of things, as some contemporary French philosophers have emphasized. In Marxist terms it is the shift from “use value” to “exchange value” and thus, seduction becomes the predominant cultural form.
The Good Life
And while increasing numbers of people attempt to live the “good life” through profligate consumption, increasing numbers of our species live in slums. And thus, if we have the financial resources, we attempt to wall ourselves off from the poverty and degradation that is increasingly manifest throughout the world. Where is Beverly Hills? Yes, Beverly Hills is a very rich suburb of Los Angeles. But it is also a posh suburb of Cairo where according to the community’s promotional literature the “inhabitants can keep their distance from the sight and severity of poverty and violence…” Similarly, OrangeCounty and Long Beach, also part of greater Los Angeles, are also suburbs of Beijing, while Palm Springs is a gated enclave of Hong Kong with extensive security. Such suburbs can be found in Bangalore in India, Jakarta in Indonesia, Manila in the Philippines, Lagos in Nigeria, and numerous other cities throughout the world where small numbers of people live according to the ideal of the “good life.”
In contrast, even before the current economic crisis, according to the United Nations, over one billion people lived in slums – urban sites “characterized by overcrowding, poor or informal housing, inadequate access to safe water and sanitation, and insecurity of tenure.” And this says nothing of the social dimensions of slums. Mumbai with 10 to 12 million squatters and tenement dwellers is, according to Mike Davis, the author of Planet of Slums, “the slum capital of the world.” And for those who may have seen the film Slumdog Millionaire, you should know that according to the Calcutta Telegraph newspaper, there are active plans to turn 80% of the Dharavi slum where the film was situated, into “a glittering township of parks, skyscrapers, shopping arcades and the good life.” Dreams die hard!
“Torches of Freedom”
But where do these dreams come from? Our dreams of the “good life” are stimulated by the institutions that insure that the economic system has a cultural component that justifies and makes consumption meaningful in spite of its consequences for life on this planet. Advertising, television, films, other forms of popular media, and even our formal education systems provide the images and stories that support profligate consumption as a way to realize our unique individuality. Religious narratives resist these secular narratives by focusing on the spiritual emptiness of materialism, and what they may consider “graven” images, but religious stories, as well as secular versions like classical socialism, do not have the seductive power of stories and images that play to the narcissism of humans.
Remember what Victor Lebow said during the Eisenhower period nearly 60 years ago – that we should “convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption.” Thus, as Michael Schudson and others have demonstrated in their work on the advertising of cigarettes to women in the early 20th century, cigarettes, as symbols, confirmed “members of an emergent social group in a new identity” – ultimately, in this case, as the “liberated” women who smoked “torches of freedom” in the New York Easter Parade of 1929. Cigarette smoking was made into a feminist issue, and now millions of women throughout the world, as well men, are addicted to these cancer inducing items valorising “freedom!”
This is just one of the more spectacular examples of the dis-embedding of individuals from traditional social and normative structures that accompanied the Industrial Revolution and its emphasis on mobility and self realization. More broadly, as William Leach has argued, “from the 1880s onward a commercial aesthetic of desire and longing took shape to meet the needs of business” as capitalism produced a new and distinct culture. The core of that culture was: “acquisition and consumption as a means of achieving happiness; the cult of the new; the democratization of desire; and money value as the predominant measure of all value in society.” Of these, the vision of the “good life” depended most fully on the democratization of desire because it implicitly emphasized “equal rights to desire the same goods and to enter the same world of comfort and luxury.” In other words, “everybody - children as well as adults, men and women, black and white - would have the same right as individuals to desire, long for, and wish for whatever they pleased.”
Implicit in such a culture however, is a denial of death and a fantasy that one will stay young forever as “the marks of perpetual childishness are grafted onto adults who indulge in puerility without pleasure, and indolence without innocence.” It is ultimately a culture informed by what Benjamin Barber has characterized as “infantilization,” an ethos “intimately associated with global consumerism.” And it is this infantilizing culture that supports “a declining global consumer economy unable to sell the poor what they need (it doesn’t pay), but trying desperately to sell the prosperous what they don’t need.”
Connecting the Dots
The ultimate consequence of this infantilization is that very few of us “connect the dots” and therefore confront the damage being done to humans and other species, as well as our planet. Connecting the dots means assessing in a mature and conscious manner the full scope of industrial pollution in humanity that this economic and cultural system creates. It also means looking at the various threats to our food and water supplies, including the astounding increase in the earth’s population, and the challenges presented by climate disruption including the increases in migration as more and more people attempt to escape the drought and famine engendered by the changes that even now we see occurring in Africa and elsewhere.
If we do not “connect the dots” and take appropriate action, we are likely to face the same prospects as earlier societies that did not take account of their environmental limits, only this time the consequences will undoubtedly be global. We must face up to the fundamental fact that our current way of living on this planet is not only unsustainable, it has put us on a path toward mass death surpassed only by what a nuclear war would engender. And those who do die may not be that unfortunate, in comparison to those who survive and face the horrific social conditions which are bound to ensue. We are quite likely to face “de-civilization,” as Zygmunt Bowman and a few others seem to intuit. Bowman’s Liquid Fear, stimulated in part by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, makes a compelling case that civilization is after all only “wafer-thin.”
What happens if the water systems break down? Or if sewage overflows, food supplies disappear, or energy is no longer available? - think of Sarajevo during the war in the Balkans. Climate change, or “climate disruption,” as President Obama’s Science Advisor John Holdren likes to call it, may be the ultimate result of our way of living on this planet, and a multitude of problems will come in its path. Scientists studying climate change are increasingly worried about what they characterized as “tipping points.”
The major tipping point may come as the tundra and the permafrost in Siberia and northern Canada melt because of the methane gas that will be reduced. Methane will be produced by decomposing plants and animals that have been lying beneath the ice in these areas since the Ice Age. Since methane is up to thirty times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas, as it’s released the atmosphere may heat up so rapidly that it will be impossible to control even if we reduce our own emissions.
One of the immediate consequences of this rapid heating is that glaciers will disappear and water will become scarce. Some estimates suggest that by 2030, over 60% of the world’s population will be under water stress. There will be massive droughts, and ultimately more deserts – the deserts in southern Spain, for example, are moving north. But even though we all know that climate change, or “climate disruption,” is a fundamental threat, the real challenge is to understand the connections between these phenomena and the other aspects of how we live. So I want to ask you 25 questions as a way of highlighting these connections.
PART II – Power Point Presentation
25 QUESTIONS: CONNECTING THE DOTS
PART III
Collapse? The Case of Easter Island
I wondered if I should title this talk “The Coming Dystopia” because I think our civilization, like others before it that exceeded their environmental limits, is facing a tumultuous 21st century, and perhaps ultimately, collapse. Earlier societies like the Maya and that of Easter Island collapsed because they did not attend to those limits. Heidi Cullen of PrincetonUniversity’s ClimateCenter argues that “Easter Island is …… this iconic image of what collapse looks like,” because “they built these massive monuments, and there’s nothing there now.” The anthropological expert on the collapse of earlier societies, Jared Diamond, makes the point that now barren Easter Island was once “covered by a forest of dozens of tree species” but as the islanders “cut down more and more trees, the trees didn’t grow back rapidly enough to replace the trees that were being cut down,” so that “sometime in the 1600’s the last tree was cut down.” Heidi Cullen wonders “what was that person on Easter Island thinking when they chopped down the last tree?”