Just so much and no more
An imaginary conversation between Donella Meadows and Robert L. Fielding
Taken from www.rlfielding.com
Donella ‘Dana’ Meadows, who died in 2001, was best known for her book, ‘Limits to Growth’, and her pioneering work in the field of environmental science. When asked if we have enough time to prevent catastrophe, she'd always say, “We have exactly enough time -- starting now!â€
What follows is an imaginary conversation with Ms. Meadows in which she outlines her ideas to save the planet.
RLF: Why do you think the laws of commerce are at variance with our well being?
DM: Not just at variance with our well being, but with the life of our home – the Earth. Well, first, let me say that I do not regard the precepts of commerce and the world of finance and economics as laws. We are right to speak of God’s laws, and the laws of Nature – the sciences, but I do not regard the world of commerce as being driven by laws.
RLF: What would you call these precepts then, if not laws?
DM: Merely habitual ways of doing things, nothing more or less. Economists talk about the ‘law’ of supply and demand as if it was something as scientifically verifiable as the boiling point of water.
RLF: But it seems to have the qualities of a law, doesn’t it? One man attempts to sell his product for the highest price he can get, and the buyer attempts to purchase the item for the lowest price he can – and prices are determined by the demand for such commodities, and the amount supplied for sale – is that not a law? Is man not acting rationally when behaving in this manner, and are we not to set our prices according to the prices set by these immutable laws of supply and demand?
DM: That does seem true but all this is manmade. It did not apply to life prior to the time when goods began to be bought and sold – exchanged, would be a better word.
RLF: But if it was right then, it must be so now, mustn’t it?
DM: You are assuming too much – typical behavior by those who espouse the notions economists like to refer to as laws.
Why did man have to exchange – could he not have cooperated with his neighbor tiling the soil in the fertile crescent – why did he feel it necessary to exchange, to put a price on his produce?
RLF: Presumably because others were doing the same, putting a value on certain goods and then exchanging the goods for something of a similar value – is that not rational?
DM: Would you still call it rational when our very existence is threatened by such activity?
RLF: How could those early farmers and craftsmen exchanging their wares have foreseen what it has all come to? How could they have predicted the effects we now see on Earth, from merely producing and exchanging?
DM: There must have come a point where some gained some advantage over others, managed to accumulate a bigger surplus and thus rest from their labors and let some hired helpers do the work. I believe that was the point at which it all started to go wrong, right there.
RLF: In what way wrong? Isn’t it natural to accumulate wealth after you have worked hard?
DM: As hard as everyone else, you mean, I take it?
RLF: There are always those who possess either greater talent or who work harder, or who happen to be more fortunate in cornering a resource and selling it for a higher price.
DM: There you have it. It is at that point, as I have said, at which things began to spiral out of control, leaving some with more and some with less, and all with too much of one thing and not enough of another, with dearths and gluts – paving the way for your laws to come in and intervene, quantifying what was basically wrong. Now, it was at this point that things were made, not out of the necessity of living, but out of the necessity of creating a surplus – wealth, which we now say is power.
With the surplus came the accumulation of goods, and with that artificial, controlled and managed shortages and gluts so that we needed a mechanism to regulate it all. What better than the law of supply and demand.
With everybody suddenly pitted against each other, that was an entirely logical thing to do. But, the damage had already been done. Working to live is one thing – it is vital, how man has managed to survive in a hostile world of hot and cold, drought and flood, but working to gain an advantage over one’s fellow is quite another.
What has that step lead us to?
RLF: To the modern world of commerce, I suppose.
DM: To using the world and its resources as a mere commodity – less, an apparently endless supplier of material we only had to dig, grow, mine or make. That is another gross error.
RLF: In what way can you call using the Earth’s resources to furnish our needs an error?
DM: You just said it – to furnish our needs. What are those? Are they any different to those felt by the man in the fields of the fertile crescent as it has since come to be known?
RLF: Basically no, they are unchanged, man has to eat, drink and keep warm, be secure and safe in his bed – those things will never change.
DM: But what of all this around us? Why do we need all this?
RLF: To live life in this millennium. How could we do without what we need – now?
DM: Man lived pretty well without most of it for thousands of years.
RLF: Though he died of diseases we no longer suffer from, lived a much shorter life.
DM: And are we to compare like with like, is the life of a man nowadays – three score and ten – what it was when life expectancy was less than 30? Can we compare living with nature, amongst it, bound by its laws, in commune with it – can we say that a life of 70 years compares with a life lived under a sheltering sky for 25?
RLF: That is impossible to say.
DM: Then if it is impossible for me to say, is it not equally impossible for you to say either?
RLF: I suppose it is.
DM: There is no ‘suppose’ about it. You were not alive then and neither was I nor anyone that is alive today.
RLF: But we have records – our history.
DM: And is that nothing but a manufactured account of life as it was, written by a scribe paid to sit and write by people whose interests were vested even then. Where is the account – even the word has the ring of finance about it – no matter – where is the account of that dawn that saw men able to live on what they could grow, supplemented by what they could kill? Where is the record of prehistory to tell us that life then was nasty, brutish and short?
Even that term came from a man who departed this earthly life thousands of years after the time of which he imagined he had described correctly.
RLF: So what you are saying is that commerce – exchanging goods, accumulating them to provide a wealth over and above what a single man could honestly produce, is at the heart of our troubles today.
DM: Yes, at the heart of our troubles, the start of them.
RLF: And would you remind me what those troubles are, in your opinion?
DM: Look around you. Earth is not able to sustain us at our present levels of production, and yet we demand more and more from her. Do economists not tell us to grow, grow, grow, that our economies can only be called successful ones if an amount of growth is achieved, year after year? Have we not come to expect a better standard of living at a lower cost to us – where is your law of supply and demand now? Where has it lead us?
And what has it made us into?
We count the cost in pounds, dollars, dinars, riyals, rupees, whereas we should be counting the cost in real terms.
RLF: Which are?
DM: The cost to our good provider, Mother Earth – the cost to our planet. We have allowed, since the time of which I have spoken, to be beguiled into systems that go on and on at the expense of the very thing that supports it – Earth, and us – slaves to a system that has doomed us to oblivion, or at least doomed future generations to oblivion.
Come back in a hundred years, a thousand, ten thousand, and ask your question again.
“Why do you think the laws of commerce are at variance with our well being?†was it not, and see what answer you get from those people trying to survive on a planet that will not support a life that even resembles the life of hardship we so foolhardily threw away back in those days when a spade was an implement to till the land and not something to sell to make money.
Robert L. Fielding
An imaginary conversation between Donella Meadows and Robert L. Fielding
Taken from www.rlfielding.com
Donella ‘Dana’ Meadows, who died in 2001, was best known for her book, ‘Limits to Growth’, and her pioneering work in the field of environmental science. When asked if we have enough time to prevent catastrophe, she'd always say, “We have exactly enough time -- starting now!â€
What follows is an imaginary conversation with Ms. Meadows in which she outlines her ideas to save the planet.
RLF: Why do you think the laws of commerce are at variance with our well being?
DM: Not just at variance with our well being, but with the life of our home – the Earth. Well, first, let me say that I do not regard the precepts of commerce and the world of finance and economics as laws. We are right to speak of God’s laws, and the laws of Nature – the sciences, but I do not regard the world of commerce as being driven by laws.
RLF: What would you call these precepts then, if not laws?
DM: Merely habitual ways of doing things, nothing more or less. Economists talk about the ‘law’ of supply and demand as if it was something as scientifically verifiable as the boiling point of water.
RLF: But it seems to have the qualities of a law, doesn’t it? One man attempts to sell his product for the highest price he can get, and the buyer attempts to purchase the item for the lowest price he can – and prices are determined by the demand for such commodities, and the amount supplied for sale – is that not a law? Is man not acting rationally when behaving in this manner, and are we not to set our prices according to the prices set by these immutable laws of supply and demand?
DM: That does seem true but all this is manmade. It did not apply to life prior to the time when goods began to be bought and sold – exchanged, would be a better word.
RLF: But if it was right then, it must be so now, mustn’t it?
DM: You are assuming too much – typical behavior by those who espouse the notions economists like to refer to as laws.
Why did man have to exchange – could he not have cooperated with his neighbor tiling the soil in the fertile crescent – why did he feel it necessary to exchange, to put a price on his produce?
RLF: Presumably because others were doing the same, putting a value on certain goods and then exchanging the goods for something of a similar value – is that not rational?
DM: Would you still call it rational when our very existence is threatened by such activity?
RLF: How could those early farmers and craftsmen exchanging their wares have foreseen what it has all come to? How could they have predicted the effects we now see on Earth, from merely producing and exchanging?
DM: There must have come a point where some gained some advantage over others, managed to accumulate a bigger surplus and thus rest from their labors and let some hired helpers do the work. I believe that was the point at which it all started to go wrong, right there.
RLF: In what way wrong? Isn’t it natural to accumulate wealth after you have worked hard?
DM: As hard as everyone else, you mean, I take it?
RLF: There are always those who possess either greater talent or who work harder, or who happen to be more fortunate in cornering a resource and selling it for a higher price.
DM: There you have it. It is at that point, as I have said, at which things began to spiral out of control, leaving some with more and some with less, and all with too much of one thing and not enough of another, with dearths and gluts – paving the way for your laws to come in and intervene, quantifying what was basically wrong. Now, it was at this point that things were made, not out of the necessity of living, but out of the necessity of creating a surplus – wealth, which we now say is power.
With the surplus came the accumulation of goods, and with that artificial, controlled and managed shortages and gluts so that we needed a mechanism to regulate it all. What better than the law of supply and demand.
With everybody suddenly pitted against each other, that was an entirely logical thing to do. But, the damage had already been done. Working to live is one thing – it is vital, how man has managed to survive in a hostile world of hot and cold, drought and flood, but working to gain an advantage over one’s fellow is quite another.
What has that step lead us to?
RLF: To the modern world of commerce, I suppose.
DM: To using the world and its resources as a mere commodity – less, an apparently endless supplier of material we only had to dig, grow, mine or make. That is another gross error.
RLF: In what way can you call using the Earth’s resources to furnish our needs an error?
DM: You just said it – to furnish our needs. What are those? Are they any different to those felt by the man in the fields of the fertile crescent as it has since come to be known?
RLF: Basically no, they are unchanged, man has to eat, drink and keep warm, be secure and safe in his bed – those things will never change.
DM: But what of all this around us? Why do we need all this?
RLF: To live life in this millennium. How could we do without what we need – now?
DM: Man lived pretty well without most of it for thousands of years.
RLF: Though he died of diseases we no longer suffer from, lived a much shorter life.
DM: And are we to compare like with like, is the life of a man nowadays – three score and ten – what it was when life expectancy was less than 30? Can we compare living with nature, amongst it, bound by its laws, in commune with it – can we say that a life of 70 years compares with a life lived under a sheltering sky for 25?
RLF: That is impossible to say.
DM: Then if it is impossible for me to say, is it not equally impossible for you to say either?
RLF: I suppose it is.
DM: There is no ‘suppose’ about it. You were not alive then and neither was I nor anyone that is alive today.
RLF: But we have records – our history.
DM: And is that nothing but a manufactured account of life as it was, written by a scribe paid to sit and write by people whose interests were vested even then. Where is the account – even the word has the ring of finance about it – no matter – where is the account of that dawn that saw men able to live on what they could grow, supplemented by what they could kill? Where is the record of prehistory to tell us that life then was nasty, brutish and short?
Even that term came from a man who departed this earthly life thousands of years after the time of which he imagined he had described correctly.
RLF: So what you are saying is that commerce – exchanging goods, accumulating them to provide a wealth over and above what a single man could honestly produce, is at the heart of our troubles today.
DM: Yes, at the heart of our troubles, the start of them.
RLF: And would you remind me what those troubles are, in your opinion?
DM: Look around you. Earth is not able to sustain us at our present levels of production, and yet we demand more and more from her. Do economists not tell us to grow, grow, grow, that our economies can only be called successful ones if an amount of growth is achieved, year after year? Have we not come to expect a better standard of living at a lower cost to us – where is your law of supply and demand now? Where has it lead us?
And what has it made us into?
We count the cost in pounds, dollars, dinars, riyals, rupees, whereas we should be counting the cost in real terms.
RLF: Which are?
DM: The cost to our good provider, Mother Earth – the cost to our planet. We have allowed, since the time of which I have spoken, to be beguiled into systems that go on and on at the expense of the very thing that supports it – Earth, and us – slaves to a system that has doomed us to oblivion, or at least doomed future generations to oblivion.
Come back in a hundred years, a thousand, ten thousand, and ask your question again.
“Why do you think the laws of commerce are at variance with our well being?†was it not, and see what answer you get from those people trying to survive on a planet that will not support a life that even resembles the life of hardship we so foolhardily threw away back in those days when a spade was an implement to till the land and not something to sell to make money.
Robert L. Fielding
Posted 4th February in: stay grounded,
