|
|
|
The Real World?
Globalisation in all its senses inevitably leads to uniformity – to cultural uniformity and, of immediate relevance to this part of the discussion, to economic uniformity. Or, to phrase that another way – to the loss of cultural and economic diversity. In terms of the functioning of complex systems, this is analogous to the loss of biodiversity – of genetic heterogeneity – in an ecosystem. The world is losing its social, cultural and economic resilience. Like an enormous field of wheat, the entire planet is becoming increasingly vulnerable to the same social or economic diseases, whatever they might be. And like that field of wheat, the global socioeconomic system will need to be very comprehensively managed if it is not to succumb to the assorted slings and arrows 1 to which it is exposed and against which it has lost its natural immunity. Or, to put this another way, the monoculture and globalisation are each dynamic equivalents of putting all one's eggs in the same basket.
Managing this homogeneous system will include the economic equivalent of applying pesticides – and have its own range of unintended, undesirable consequences. The actions of the IMF2 would seem to fall within that category. I do not have the impression that living conditions within countries that have obeyed IMF directives have improved because of that response. And again we encounter the stupefying inconsistency of a system which sets out to produce global homogeneity, which therefore must be managed but which asserts that the ultimate god is the free market which must be left entirely to its own devices. I argued… that the global ecosystem is in serious danger of ‘collapsing' to the extent of being unable to support more than a small proportion of the present human population – if that. It would seem that there are good reasons for suspecting that a collapse of the global socio-economic system might be more imminent. There are others far more familiar than I with the world of finance and economics who share such an opinion.
…If I were to make one simple generalisation it might be that, once Man adopted agriculture, the most fundamental threat to the long-term survival of our species lay in that deficiency [human difficulty in understanding and dealing with the dynamics of complex systems]… A derivative of that blind spot is an apparently widespread inability to recognise that a dynamic system that apparently works well over a significant period of time might not, for any number of reasons, be able to do so ‘for ever'.
This type of faith or scepticism – it can take either form – shows itself in many ways. It is reflected in the ridicule that has been heaped on Thomas Malthus over the years, in refusal to acknowledge that some natural resources are effectively finite and therefore exhaustible, in some of the assumptions underlying the push to continue raising crop yields – for more ‘Green Revolutions', in the underlying faith in continuing technological salvation – and so on.
…It would be foolish indeed to pretend that the ecological situation is anything but dangerously unstable. The problems we have generated are vast and, although conceptually simple, they are immensely difficult to deal with in practice. The most fundamental and most daunting challenge probably lies in coming to terms with ourselves. Perhaps we should begin by acknowledging that we are quite a strange species of animal or, more specifically, of chimpanzee that is showing precious little evidence of adapting to its ecological environment. We might also pause to consider whether sapiens is the most appropriate specific name for us. Clever, yes; smart, yes; – but wise? And, as someone or other once said – it's later than you think.
Notes :
| 1 |
"Slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" in Shakespeare - i.e. things going wrong |
| 2 |
International Monetary Fund |
Excerpted with kind permission from Feed or Feedback: Agriculture, Population Dynamics and the State of the Planet by A. Duncan Brown, 2003. International Books.
|
|
