Review and discussion of Right Relationship: Building a Whole Earth Economy by Peter G. Brown and Geoffrey Garver.
(Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.: 2009)
Our current economic system – which assumes endless growth and limitless potential wealth – flies in the face of the fact that the earth’s life-support capacity is finite. The result is increasing destruction of the natural world and growing, sometimes lethal, tension between rich and poor. Peter G. Brown and Geoffrey Garver use the core Quaker principle of “right relationship” – respecting the integrity, resilience, and beauty of human and natural communities – as the foundation for a new economic model. (text from the cover of the book).
Is there hope for the planet’s future?
The authors ask: “Will future generations of humans and the rest of life’s commonwealth have hope for life on this planet?” The book prompts me to ask myself: Have I lost my optimism about the possibility of humans changing their hearts and minds and behaviors to respect earth’s integrity, resilience and beauty? Brown and Garver are bold enough to imagine, to envision, a promising future for the human family and the larger community of life on earth. How does their boldness affect my own attitude and spirit?
My Virginia license plate is EAARTH. Eaarth is the name of a recent book by Bill McKibben, in which he simply describes the current state of a planet which we used to know as Earth, but which has changed from the planet I knew as a child. This past spring when we bought this Prius, I designed the license plate to print EAARTH on a background of the agriculture theme plate, with a picture of a barn and the phrase “Farming since 1614.” A person who designs a license plate like that must hold out some hope – else why bother with the reminder?
I believe it is most important to behave as if we were working towards a more promising future, even if the prospects, when you think about it, don’t seem very good. In the foreword, Thomas Lovejoy says, “Clearly the time is at hand – indeed it is overdue – for a grand reconciliation between humans, human systems, and the environment.” My sticky note at that paragraph says “too late?”
Bill McKibben wrote a book a couple years ago called Deep Economy in which he points to ways in which strengthened local economies could help mitigate the negative effects of globalization.
What is “right relationship?”
What does “Right relationship” mean? It’s easy to point to examples of “wrong relationship”, such as the Alberta tar sands development. One could write an entire book to catalogue, even at this early stage of development of the tar sands, the numerous “wrong relationships” among humans and life in this one project alone. That project illustrates how the planetary economic system is racing ahead to power air conditioners in deserts, furnaces in the arctic, many cars, trucks and jets. The authors point to some of the many ways in which the development of these tar sands is a massive attempt to alter the relationships of the substances normally found below the earth with those on it. The immense Athabaska River, adapted over millennia and nourishing the boreal forest, enters into a long-term new set of relationships. To flush oil from the sands, the river is drained, boiled, forced through the oil-drenched sands, and then deposited in enormous tailing ponds, in which the oil’s poisonous hydrocarbons are supposed to settle. The life-giving water of the Athabaska is removed from any use by life forms ever again. This alteration of relationships transforms the thousands of square miles devoted to tar sands development into a huge, toxic graveyard of former life, with a stench of sulfur and hot asphalt. The surface of the earth is stripped of all animal or plant habitat.
Restating the obvious?
In much of the book, the authors sound as though they are writing to people who have just arrived from another planet, explaining to them the mess the earth is in and why. For example, they point out that “modern industrial agriculture, which devotes large sections of the earth’s land surface to poison-soaked monocultures and which actively repels nature’s biodiversity, is one of the first systems that needs to be rethought, rescaled, and restructure.” They take note that “Doing so will undoubtedly, in the long run, also entail scaling the human population more wisely within the ecosystems on which each group depends.” Duh.
Providing conceptual frameworks
But they go beyond simple summary descriptions of the mess, to provide some conceptual frameworks they believe could be helpful in restructuring and rethinking how humans are operating. One such framework is the I= f(PATE) model. In this model, the main variables that affect Integrity (I) of the planet are Population (P), Affluence (A), Technology (T), and Ethics (E). The writers do actually visualize humans being able to operationalize and quantify these variables and their interrelationships for given localities and regions across the earth. They further visualize a set of world, national, and regional organizations that would develop and apply this information and analysis in such a way that individuals and societies would operate within the ecological limits of their localities and the overall planet.
I am not as optimistic about our human ability to model these complexities with any predictive accuracy, but much would be learned in the process of trying. or in even acknowledging the need to do so.
How to obtain needed changes? Is understanding enough?
I remember well a period of several years in my life when I participated in a study group called “WISE – Witnesses In Search of a Sane Economy,” in which we held a certain premise. The premise was roughly this: that if people just understood how the economic system of our country and international business and industry is intrinsically doomed to destroy the very planet upon which we depend for all life, then people and societies would find other ways to run the economy.
Similarly, Brown and Garver believe “The current challenge is to consolidate the highest quality evidence on the ecological threats that arise from our current economy and to present the consequences of endless growth to the public with complete honesty.” Then, publicize, educate, and involve the public in promulgating the case for a whole earth economy. “The goal is to trigger mass appeal for the urgent need to act, so that the demand for change will swell to an overwhelming consensus for a new way forward.”
The core belief of our WISE founder, Rabbi Carla Theodore, was that the central challenge was to find ways to “break the link between work and income.” It was the requirement for paying jobs, in an ever-growing economy, that was the tragic flaw in our economic system. If we didn’t need growth to generate more and more jobs, then the “economy” could slow down and we wouldn’t have to produce and consume so many unnecessary goods and produce so much pollution and use up so much of the planet’s capacity in the process.
As we struggled with these ideas, in small group workshops and via email and newsletters, I became more and more discouraged about the prospects for beneficial change. The hopeful ideas that were being generated, when you examined them in much depth, seemed completely unrealistic and impossible to attain politically or organizationally.
Brighten the corner where you are?
Eventually, I took on more and more of my husband Hal’s philosophy – just “light a candle where you are” locally, and try not to think about the bigger picture of darkness globally. This requires a certain cognitive dance, a compartmentalization of the mind, that puts famine and disease and floods and fires elsewhere on the planet on one movie screen while the beauty of our Rappahannock headwaters community and ecology is foremost in our daily focus and behavior.
RappFLOW (Rappahannock Friends and Lovers of Our Watersheds), an organization I helped found back in 2001, is a perfect example of this philosophy. When a couple dozen interested citizens were discussing the idea of forming a group To help preserve, protect, conserve and restore water resources and watersheds, we added the geographic qualifier: in Rappahannock County. We are at the headwaters of the Rappahannock River Basin (that is, where the streams begin, at the top of the watershed). In discussing the mission of the group, we considered including the entire river basin. But we were persuaded by leaders more experienced in such efforts, that if our citizens were to become better stewards of the land and water over which they had control and influence, they needed to think about it in terms of their own back yards and fields and forests and neighborhoods and animals and farms. This focus on local has been a successful strategy by many counts. (See www.rappflow.org for reports, data, events, many accomplishments of this volunteer-based group and its partners over the past few years).
Limits to “local”
This local focus has been useful in producing more and better public awareness, improved land management practices by landowners, and policies of local government. Yet at the same time, local patterns of temperatures and precipitation over this period of time have been changing due to regional and global trends and factors far beyond the control of our mere 8,000 County residents. These changes make more challenging the protection of watersheds at the local level. Temperatures have increased, and we are experiencing changes in precipitation patterns that results in springs going dry, groundwater recharge lessening, base flow of streams and rivers decreasing, less dependable snow cover in the mountains. Some of us wonder about the future of agriculture in our intentionally rural, scenic community, if hayfields and grazing fields don’t receive long, slow rains needed for groundwater recharge and feeding/watering the cattle, sheep and horses.
We wonder whether these local and regional patterns of temperature and precipitation are part of the larger, long term global climate change, or more short-term aberrations from historical norms. We wonder whether local on-the-ground landowner action – such as better stormwater management on all lands; improving vegetative buffers along streams; reducing the amount of land that is mowed; substituting tall grasses, shrubs and trees for mowed grass; mob grazing and other cattle management techniques that allow grasses to grow deeper roots; planting warm season grasses; restoring eroded stream banks — whether these and other Best Management Practices can sufficiently mitigate or help adapt to the negative effects of long term changes in temperature and precipitation on groundwater supply and farming.
Despite the gruesome evidence of the inherently flawed human capacity for rational organization, ethics, and behavior, I still do make efforts to influence in small ways our understandings and efforts. For several years I have been purchasing and giving away copies of Lester Brown’s Plan B: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble. (http://www.earth-policy.org/books/pb/pb_table_of_contents ). Also, pursuing many locavore efforts such as those suggested by Deep Economy. Also, working with local church and Episcopal Diocese to strengthen Stewardship of Creation activities and organization.
Dan Spethmann, a member of the Board of Directors of RappFLOW, gave me a copy of the book Right Relationship as a way of introducing himself to me. Dan’s dissertation advisor is Peter Brown, senior author of the book. Brown is a professor at McGill University’s School of Environment and author of Restoring the Public Trust and The Commonwealth of Life. He holds a master’s degreee in the philosophy of religion from Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University, and a PhD. from Columbia in philosophy. At the University of Maryland he founded the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, and established the School’s Environmental Policy Programs.
Brown and Garver say, “People need to think about pursuing joyful, grateful, and fulfilling lives in right relationship with life’s commonwealth.” In so doing, they need to confront five key questions and their answers that will chart a path to putting the economy in right relationship with life’s commonwealth:
- What is the economy for?
- How does it work?
- How big is too big?
- What is fair?
- How should it be governed?
Overcoming the failure of imagination
The authors’ motivation in writing this book is primarily what they view as a “lethal failure of imagination” such that it is now “easier to imagine Earth’s life-support systems breaking down than to imagine that our ecologically incoherent and destructive economic system will be significantly altered.” I confess that I have sometimes suffered from that lethal failure of imagination even while working in small ways towards something better at the individual, family, and local community level. For me, the “right relationship” concepts and vision might help to bridge the chasm between productive local efforts and global disaster.
Or maybe, addressing such a big challenge is justification for staying alive awhile longer.
