the ecoSelf project

First published in The Great Outdoors Magazine, Jan. 2003.

Back in the 1980’s there was a trend to blame the ecological issues facing the world on one simple cause – overpopulation. The story went like this… Current environmental problems are the result of human overpopulation, therefore to deal with these problems we must reduce, or at very least stabilise, the human population. Simple.

It was argued that here in the materially wealthy West, we already have a stable population and have, therefore, done our bit. However, in the materially poorer countries not yet fully integrated into the global industrial economy, populations continue to expand exponentially. Obviously, these poorer countries are causing the environmental crisis. The answer, of course, is to ‘develop’ these poorer countries to the point where their standard of material wealth is high enough that they no longer feel the need to have large families to ensure their survival. In short, the answer to the environmental question is increased economic growth.

Unfortunately, the whole idea of sustainable development has been almost entirely hijacked by this mad notion, so that now we are told that the best way to meet the ecological challenges facing us is to seek to increase economic growth in every possible way, in every corner of the world. Herein lies the greatest paradox of our ecologically impossible era – it would appear that the way to deal with the problems caused by continuous economic growth… is more continuous economic growth.

Of course, current ecological problems cannot be reduced to any one single issue. These are ecological problems – caused by not understanding that everything is connected to everything else, and the factor mostly closely connected to human population is the amount we each consume.

To offer an extreme example, if everyone in the world consumed as much as the average Bangladeshi there would be more than enough resource to go around, even at forecasted peak population levels. If however, everyone in the world consumed as much as the average American, we would need five more planet Earths just to cope with the resultant pollution, let alone provide enough raw material. Obviously, how much we each consume is an important variable in the population equation. But this is a variable that threatens the very core of our western way of life. Our whole culture is built on the principles of consumption and production – on the modern economic system and, as George Bush Senior put it at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, “The American way of life is not up for negotiation”. With one simple statement of patriotic rhetoric, George Senior managed to conveniently side step the USA out of any responsibility for being the world’s largest consumer of resources and producer of pollution. A skill he has evidently passed on to his son.

That the assumptions underlying our economic system are ‘absolutes’ is what economists’ Herman Daly and John Cobb refer to as a ‘Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness’ – a fallacy of ‘truths’ built though a slow isolation from the original conditions that created them. Economist Adam Smith developed his idea of market economics in eighteenth century Scotland, where market places, labour and capital were geographically bound; where no one firm could dominate the market; where advertising didn’t exist and where religion was a given condition of commerce. These things are no longer present in global economics, and yet Adam Smith’s ‘Invisible Hand’ of market forces remains the very basis of our entire culture. In fact, we no longer even trade much real stuff at all – 97% of the global value of trade is in the buying and selling of money itself.

The ‘Invisible Hand’ is a misplaced fallacy. Our survival depends, at least in part, on dealing with the fact that our current economic system is now in direct conflict with the ecological systems of life upon which we depend. While we can always create more money on the hard drives of the worlds’ banks, the planets’ systems of life remain finite. An economic system dependant on a kind of ‘virtual reality’ is obviously a seriously dangerous proposition. I am not saying that market economics doesn’t work, what I’m saying is that our contemporary economic system is no longer real market economics.

One of the few remaining ways of seeing through this ‘virtual reality’ is to spend time in the wilderness. Places where life is reduced to simple realities, where needs and wants are easy to tease apart, where our personal behaviour is dictated by the greater planetary systems of which we are merely one small part.
But even here consumerism has crept in and brought with it ‘Gear Fear’ – the fear of venturing out without the ‘right’ equipment. Now, apparently, we need mobile phones, GPS’s, breathable fabrics, shock-absorbing insoles, walking poles, unbreakable flasks, five different types of boot depending on the terrain, altimeters and inflatable mattresses that turn into chairs. But where does it all end? A study in the USA which asked, “How much money is enough” to a cross section of people – from millionaires to those on welfare hand-outs – discovered that “about twice as much as I currently have” was the most common response. It seems that however much you have, you are only ever half way to “enough”.

Meanwhile, the British Medical Journal reveals that anxiety and depression are the world’s greatest cause of disease. Something big is missing in the assumption that consumerism is the pathway to happiness. Ultimately – and controversially in a magazine full of glossy adverts – we just don’t need all this stuff, especially when it isn’t making us any happier while simultaneously denying millions of humans – and other species – access to the basic conditions of life.

Ironic too, that if we persist in insulating ourselves from the very wildness that we seek when venturing into the hills, through our obsessive over-consumption, then we are also denying ourselves an essential experience of a ‘more-than-human’ reality. We are destroying experiences that we might just depend on as a catalyst for reconnecting us with the limits of or own habitat. What lessons can we learn about humility and the power of the wild Earth, when a glance at a little screen can place you anywhere on the planet within a couple of metres? What does it mean for the whole idea of adventure – which by definition involves ‘outcomes which are uncertain’ – when ‘uncertainty’ itself is increasingly rare?

As we narrow our world further and further into a homogenised monoculture of gadgets and brands, we clip the wings off our own experiences and turn down the volume of life’s music, effectively severing the sinews that connect us to the great body of the Earth. This is a disconnection that allows us to fish Cod to extinction, to tear down ancient rain forests, to consume without conscience, to ignore the feedback of our own life systems and to take without ever giving back. It’s time to consume less stuff and get out more.

Tags: deep ecology, ecopsychology, nature, wilderness