The Environmental Revolution
A lot of Capitalists assume the best economic solution to the environmental crisis is to exploit the environment right up to the point that we can no longer afford to extract anything from it, so that we get all we can out of the environment and build up our economy as much as possible—as if the environmental economy works the same as the stock market.
That won’t work for a number of reasons.
First of all, there isn’t a point at which environmental sustainability or unsustainability will be decided. It’s more like a slope leading up to the edge of a cliff. The slope represents possible relationships between population size and standards of living. Everywhere on the slope we have the same size of economy, but as we ascend the slope, the economy gets spread out among more people. If we wait until the very last minute to start leading environmentally sustainable lifestyles, we’ll end up with the worst possible standard of living.
If we wait until we reach the very edge of the cliff, and we assume optimistically that Capitalism has an OFF switch, which we could throw to shift instantly to an egalitarian economic system, by that point we’ll all be slaves to the environment. Waiting until the last possible moment to shift to an environmentally sustainable economy necessarily means spreading our economy as thinly as we can. That means spreading our economy so thinly that we barely have enough left to keep everyone alive. That means everyone in the world getting up every morning, going to work, earning enough to keep themselves alive for one more day, going home with nothing else to show for their work, and then going back to work the next day to do the same thing all over again, every single day of their lives. A lot of people in Africa already live that way.
Basically, this way we’d turn the entire world into a giant Wal-Mart, where we’d all have to work bagging groceries for our entire lives, because nobody could afford to build universities anymore to learn how to do anything else.
Of course, if we don’t magically turn into Socialists at the very last moment before we jump off the environmental cliff, it’ll only be worse. If everyone in the world has barely enough, then there would be only one way left for people to get more: fight each other for it. Then we all fall over the environmental cliff. If people are fighting over barely enough resources to keep everyone alive, whoever is fighting in self-defense is fighting for survival. People who are fighting for survival are fighting to win. In order to win, they’re going to need to get hold of more resources to fight with. That means extracting more resources from the environment to keep themselves alive in the short-term, and that means sacrificing the environment in the long term.
The fate of the global environment has come down to a very straightforward chemical reaction.
People are made out of topsoil nutrients. Period. If topsoil nutrients don’t move into people at the same rate they move out of people, it means the people aren’t getting enough to eat. Period. That means you have a famine, and lots of people are going to die. Period.
No amount of bleeding heart liberal know-it-alls believing that life is so mystical and magical and wondrous that it can’t possibly all be caused by topsoil nutrients is going to change that. If your life isn’t made possible by the nutrients in the food you eat, what is it made possible by? Are you really going to try to convince impoverished foreign peasants that there are mystical magical wondrous things in life that are more important than food? How exactly do you intend to win public support for your political movement that way?
Geez, and progressively minded people try to convince me that teaching everyone about science is going to make them overlook important things in life.
Basically, The Limits to Growth—The 30 Year Update is a book about how some of the world’s greatest scientists reinvented the anti-Capitalist revolution all on their own, by studying scientific evidence. The difference between their version of anti-Capitalism and the traditional version is, theirs isn’t just their opinion about how people should live. It’s simple mathematics. People need certain things to live. Are they going to get them, or not? Are we going to institute the economic and political systems we need to get people the things they need, or not? Period.
The economic and political systems we have now work the way they do because of the decision-making structures that are built into the political systems. If we had different decision-making structures, we would have a different economy. If we want a different economy, we need different decision-making structures.
The basic decision-making structure the scientists allude to, but stop somewhere short of spelling out in the interests of maintaining their professional reputations, depends on two basic things.
First of all, individual people need to be able to get the information they need, take action independently, and work together to solve problems. That means a political system to which everyone can contribute their input, and in which everyone can participate.
Second, social structures that enable large-scale decision-making and that absolutely minimize all delays.
This creates a hierarchy with only two tiers. The top is basically the United Nations, although not necessarily the United Nations as we know it. The bottom is something that’s basically identical to the World Social Forum. Or the Industrial Workers of the World’s idea of one big union.
My intellectual peers number about two tenths of one percent of the human race. As far as most people are concerned, I have intellectual superpowers. To try to build a political structure that had no hierarchy at all would be to try to force me, and people like me, to be just like everyone else, just so everyone else could feel equal to us. That would be nothing but an emotional welfare system. The Communists tried to force everyone to live at equally low economic levels, and where did it get them? Trying to force everyone to live at equally low intellectual levels just to keep from hurting anyone’s feelings would cause more harm than good.
I’ve already told you how escaping the environmental crisis will depend on Green Socialism. Keeping the government democratic depends on an effective Anarchistic dual power system. It doesn’t matter if Anarchists don’t want to see it that way. Anyone who knows enough about how the world works to serve in the upper tier understands that democracy and political equitability depend on the citizens directly wielding an effective balance of power. In a democracy, the workers are supposed to be one big union. Anyone who weilds power over anyone else is inherently untrustworthy. Anyone who deserves to weild power over anyone else understands that, and understands that democracy survives because the workers are one big union. That’s why I said that if anyone ever claims to found a government on my work who perceives Anarchism to be a threat to social stability, shoot him.
The bottom tier is pretty much everything the people who set up the World Social Forum have figured out. If you carry what the scientists hinted at to its logical conclusion, it means a general social structure the size of the entire world, in which anyone can come together and meet with anyone else, to talk about their problems, help each other solve them, learn from each other, and whatever else. The main difference between the World Social Forum as it exists today and this social structure of the future would be that the people in the upper level of the hierarchy wouldn’t interfere with it. Instead of the World Social Forum being a movement of anti-Capitalist revolutionaries, it would be just the way things are done from now on.
The social structures we will need to escape the environmental crisis will be something like a government, but nothing like any governments we have right now. Since all of economics is a product of the environment, and all of politics is a product of economics, any politician who isn’t an expert at environmental science doesn’t know the first thing about economics or politics. So once again, carrying what these scientists couldn’t afford to put in print to its logical conclusion, there are extremely few people in the world right now who are qualified for the upper level of the hierarchy.
In a political system constructed with the goal of escaping the environmental crisis, a certain amount of political inequality is inescapable, for the simple reason that there are some exceptional people who have far better abilities and skills for dealing with the environmental crisis than anyone else.
However, if political inequality becomes the goal of any of those people, the political system is guaranteed to break down. Environmental sustainability will depend on everyone’s input, because in the global environmental crisis, everyone is affected by other people’s actions. Intentional political inequality is the intentional prevention of people’s contribution of their input. So Rule #1 for anyone who wants to get into the upper tier of the hierarchy is, if you try to make the government politically inequitable beyond what your exceptional abilities make inescapable, you’re out. And then maybe life in prison, or death by firing squad, or something like that.
In the lower tier of the hierarchy, everyone working together can keep the political system equitable, even though it isn’t literally equal. Scientific geniuses still have to eat, and if all the world’s farmers are in the lower tier, the people in the upper tier better be nice to everyone.
More specifically, all scientific geniuses don’t necessarily have to belong to the upper tier. Right now I don’t belong to the upper tier. The lower tier is what makes the upper tier possible. Once you establish the lower tier as a worldwide social structure in which everyone can work together independently of their governments, you give the people what they need to build a new upper tier if they don’t like the one they have.
Basically, anyone who’s qualified to serve in the upper tier understands that environmental sustainability depends on practical political equality, and practical political equality depends on the people in the lower tier being able to replace the people in the upper tier or completely dismantle the upper tier and replace it with a new upper tier easily at any time. That depends on the people in the upper tier teaching the people in the lower tier as much as those people are capable of learning about how to perform the functions of the upper tier. Motivated people who care about environmental sustainability but don’t have exceptional abilities at it are worth a lot more than corrupt geniuses. There’s no such thing as a corrupt environmental genius, because environmentalism and corruption are mutually exclusive. If you’re not an environmental genius, you don’t belong in the upper tier anyway.
The success or failure of the upper tier won’t be measured by elections or futile attempts at impeachment like we have now. The success or failure of the upper tier will be measured by public approval. Right now, President Bush has about a 70% public disapproval rating. If 70% of Americans want him gone, obviously the only reason he’s still President is because those people are unable to remove him from office legally and unwilling to take their chances on removing him from office illegally. Obviously, a president with a 70% public disapproval rating is an armed revolution the public doesn’t dare to start.
Basically, you teach everyone in the lower tier about planetary biology, and then whoever is the best at it gets to move up to the upper tier. But the people in the lower tier all learn how to do the jobs of the people in the upper tier, and they can remove people from the upper tier at any time by a public vote of no confidence.
Anyone who can’t understand all of this can’t do the job of the upper tier. Anyone who can do the job will go to work every day knowing that the only reason they have their jobs is because the people in the lower tier have chosen not to overthrow them.
The scientists who wrote The Limits to Growth didn’t actually think of all of this, because they aren’t trying to mastermind a political revolution, they’re just trying to help facilitate a transition to environmental sustainability. But they’ve been saying since the first book came out that to make a transition to environmental sustainability, radical social change will be necessary. And that’s what we’re here for.
The basic political system the scientists did spell out—without realizing it—is the same political system that small groups of indigenous people who live in the jungles of the Amazon, or wherever, have been using all along. These scientists didn’t figure it out, they just reinvented the idea. Other scientists have figured out how that works recently, and obviously, everyone figured it out at one point.
A basic indigenous tribal government consists of two basic tiers. In the upper tier are the elders of the tribe, who earned their places there by being the best at the most important things. In the lower tier is everyone else. The people in the lower tier have enough brains to understand that the elders of the tribe know the most, so they’d better do what they say. The people in the upper tier have brains enough to understand that if they betray the people in the lower tier, their political system will break down.
This is the original political system of humanity. People used it all over the world for at least 50,000 years, from the evolution of spoken language to the first development of agriculture. There are some people who are still using it today. It has proven so successful for the same reason anything proves successful—because it works. Big decisions get made by the people who are best at making them, little decisions get made by everyone, everyone does whatever they’re best at, and everyone works together get what they need.
As you may have noticed, that was how the government here in America was supposed to work. The problem is, a lot of people figured out how to get into the upper tier and cheat, and thought they could get away with it. Now a lot of people in the lower tier have learned that they can’t trust the people in the upper tier, so they don’t cooperate with them—not that cooperating with them would do them any good anyway. The people in the upper tier have the goal of political inequality, and sure enough, it’s making our political system break down.
I think it’s worth pointing out that Lenin—one of the best-known anti-Capitalists in history—figured out his own version of this basic political structure. The upper tier of the Soviet Union was going to be made up of the Communist leaders, and the lower tier was going to be made up of the workers. The workers would control the means of production, and if they didn’t approve of what their leaders were doing, they could stop them in their tracks with a general strike. As you can see, he had all the basic components in place.
Lenin only served in office for about one year after the smoke cleared from the Russian Revolution, so he never got the chance to put this into effect, and Stalin obviously wasn’t interested in political equality for the workers. Even if Lenin did get the chance to put his visionary form of government into effect, and even if he did live up to his word (he could’ve been lying, but we’ll never know), it still wouldn’t’ve worked. Lenin still had fundamental misunderstandings of how the physical economy of the universe and the economy of life work, so he still would’ve made big mistakes, things would’ve gone wrong, and no one of the time would’ve been able to figure out why. The Russian Revolution happened 50 years before the idea that eventually would become planetary biology was even conceived. Lenin would’ve made a lot of plans that didn’t work, and a lot of promises that weren’t physically possible for him to deliver, and the Soviet political system would’ve turned into just another good idea that didn’t work in practice.
Ultimately, escaping the environmental crisis depends on our adapting the original political system of humanity and applying it on a global scale.
As I said, the World Social Forum is a good beginning of the lower tier, and the United Nations is a good idea for the upper tier. Unfortunately, there are a lot of other tiers in between right now that are getting in the way.
This is not to say that the literal United Nations should be the only part of the upper tier. This is to say that any social structure that’s created needs to be a part of either the upper tier or the lower tier. Any social structure people create is either a part of the tier where exceptional people make big decisions, or it’s part of the tier where everyone makes little decisions.
Really, the only thing standing between us and environmental sustainability is all those excess tiers that create political inequality—which are also known as social structures that make oppression possible.
Remember what I said about the lower tier making the existence of the upper tier possible, and how practical political equality depended on the people of the lower tier learning enough about planetary biology to recognize that the people in the upper tier were exceptionally good at it, but also to be able to take over their jobs if they failed? And you know how, at this very moment, you’re reading a book about the revolutionary uses of planetary biology? By the end of this book, you will know more about planetary biology than just about anyone who occupies any upper tier, with the exception of people who work in scientific advisory committees for the United Nations, and you’ll know about lots of other books you can read if you want to learn more.
You are helping to build the lower tier at this very moment. Then it’s just a matter of building an upper tier where the people actually know more than the people in the lower tier. If everyone who’s in the lower tier now learns how to serve in the new upper tier better than most anyone who’s currently occupying an upper tier, all that will leave will be to make the people who currently occupy the upper tiers understand that they’re fired.
This is a political revolution through education.
Really, how much of a stretch of the imagination is it to say that anyone who can’t get a Ph.D. in planetary biology doesn’t deserve to be a political leader?