Our Common Humanity

by Crystal Busenbark

“The earth provides enough resources for everyone’s need,
but not for some people’s greed.” --Mahatma Gandhi

Environmental policy is the basis of democracy. Life and livelihoods are intertwined with the natural environment. Without a healthy world, all the things we hold dear will cease to exist.

The earth has always provided for us everything we need to survive. She has given us the atmosphere to breathe, the water to drink and the food to eat. She has given us thousands of varieties of plants and places to make our homes. The earth gives us all of these things without any protest. She gives to us beyond measure. The earth is our greatest ally, our protector, and yet we treat her as if she was our slave and we were her masters. We have become selfish, always wanting more and capitalism has become the perfect system to promote this wide-spread greed.

When is enough enough? For the truly greedy, it never is. Greed is what feeds the atrocities of the mega corporate conglomerates, which have no moral convictions, except the pursuit of profit. In today’s society these corporations have overtaken our government in size and power. Of the 100 largest economies on earth right now, 51 are corporations. These corporations are exploiting our natural resources by chopping down our trees, blowing up our mountains, and using up all our water. They are leaving behind a pile of destruction where ever they go and we’re running out of oil, running out of land to expand food production and generally running out of planet to exploit.

In the past three decades alone, one-third of the planets natural resource base has been consumed. We are cutting and mining and hauling and trashing at such a fanatical rate that we’re undermining the planets very ability for people to live here. In the United States we have less than 4% of our original forests left. 40% of our waterways have now become undrinkable. We are not just using up too many of these God given natural resources, but we’re using far more than our fair share. The United States has just 5% of the world’s population, yet somehow we are consuming 30% of the world’s resources and we are creating 30% of the worlds waste. If we were to continue to consume at this rate we would need three to five planets but unfortunately we have only one. How is it made possible for us here in the US to consume all these resources despite the fact that we account for such a small portion of the earths population? This has been accomplished through the blatant exploitation of the people, land, and resources of the third world while at the same time preventing these countries from developing their own industries. Even though these indigenous people have been living on this land for generations, multinational corporations claim that they do not own their land or their natural resources. These corporations have obliterated our global fisheries with 75% of them now being fished at or beyond capacity. They have used up 80% of our planets original forests. And in the Amazon alone, we’re now losing 2,000 trees a minute. Due to the erosion of local environments and economies 200,000 people a day are moving from environments that have cared for and sustained them for generations. They will most likely move to the big city slums where they will work in dingy polluted factories making less than $2 a day.

Our zealous consumption is not free; it has come at an astounding price. We are paying with the loss of our clean air and our natural resources. We have paid with an increase in asthma and cancer rates. The children of the Congo have paid with their future, 30% of these children have now dropped out of school to mine coltan, a type of metal that we here in the first world need to make our disposable electronics. But most importantly we will eventually pay with the loss of all our lives because if humanity keeps abusing the earth in this way she will retaliate against her abusers and we will be eliminated.

We are a nation of consumers. Consumption is the heart of our system and it has become the driving force behind our economy. After 9/11 when our country was still shocked and reeling from the devastation it had suffered, President Bush did not tell us to grieve, or pray, or even to hope, he told us to shop. As a society we have come to measure our own value and worth not by what we contribute but by how much we consume. We keep a constant flow of materials and goods flowing through our system at all times. Only an astonishing 1% of it all is still in use 6 months after purchase. This means that 99% of everything that we have harvested, mined, processed and transported will be gone after 6 months, buried in a land mine somewhere, never to be seen again.

We haven’t always been a nation of consumers. Over the last 50 years we have more than doubled our consumption rate, parting from a way of life that valued stewardship and resourcefulness. I think that retailing analyst Victor Lebow put it best when he said, “Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption....we need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever accelerating rate.”

This was our answer after World War II as to how we were going to fix and build our economy. President Eisenhower’s Council of Economic Advisors Chairman stated that, “The American economy’s ultimate purpose is to produce more consumer goods.” Our ultimate goal is not to provide food, shelter, health insurance, education, sustainability or justice; it is to become the ultimate consumers. So far our plan has been met with astounding success.

To keep us consuming, many manufacturers design their products in such a way that they wear out after a certain amount of usage or otherwise become obsolete, a process called planned obsolescence. The other major strategy used to create perpetual consumption is perceived obsolescence, which is the constant updating and outdating of products and styles. This process makes us feel as though our fully functional products are no longer satisfactory; we see this to a great degree in both the electronics and fashion industries. There’s no greater perpetrator in the spewing forth of this overall dissatisfaction than our own media. Each of us living here in the United States is bombarded with more than 3,000 advertisements a day. We will see more advertisements in this year alone than people 50 years ago saw in an entire lifetime. These advertisements will tell us 3,000 times a day that we’re just not good enough. We have the wrong hair, the wrong skin, the wrong clothes and the wrong car. But luckily they have the answers to all these problems, all we must do is buy their products and we too can be “right” again. Media also plays a crucial role in hiding the anguish and ugliness that this consumption brings about. We don’t see the child laborers, the displaced peoples, the pollution, the sweat shops or the raping of our natural resources. All we see is the finished product, packaged in shiny wrappings, waiting for us to be bullied into buying it.

We can’t keep going down this path. Every person living in the United Sates produces four and a half pounds of garbage everyday, which is twice as much as we were producing 30 years ago. We must reclaim and transform our system into something based on sustainability and equity. We are in desperate need of a deeper democracy, one that recognizes the value of all living systems upon which human welfare and survival wholly depends. The environment is at the base of our global society and when we ignore the environment, all the things built on it – culture, society, livelihoods –will suffer and eventually cease to exist. Property rights may not be universal, but water, food and seeds are universal human rights. Joint ownership of the planet is essential in a very real sense in order to stop endemic starvation, malnutrition, thirst, poverty, terrorism, racism, and extremism.

There is a new movement rising up, a resistance of the disadvantaged and excluded, who are working to protect their fundamental rights to the earth’s resources. Markets and free trade have paved the way for globalization, which has removed responsibility and accountability from corporations and in this system the poor have the function of bearing all the costs. History has shown us that societies that over-exploit their resources and life-support systems are bound to collapse. Living economies are an alternative to the unsustainable system. Living economies are based on co-ownership and co production, on sharing and participation.

A living economy respects the renewable limits of natural resources and shares those resources to ensure everyone’s needs are met. Biodiversity and water cannot be privatized in a living economy. A living economy relies on localization as an ecological imperative. Globalization leads to growth of the market, without creating jobs or providing security, whereas living economies revolve around human needs and preserving nature. Economics and ecology are not pitted against each other in living economies. The question of how we choose to view the world is based on our values. Living economies value life over profit and allow us to reclaim our common humanity.

We must realize that we are all members of the earth community and we all have a duty to protect the rights and welfare of all species and peoples. As human beings we have no right to encroach on the ecological space of others species or people, or treat them with cruelty and violence. All species, humans, and cultures have intrinsic worth. They are subjects, not objects that can be manipulated or owned. We have no right to own other species, other people or the knowledge of other cultures through patents and other intellectual property rights. It is the duty of all people who live on this beautiful planet to defend biological and cultural diversity. Diversity is an end in itself, a value, a source of richness both material and cultural. All humans have the right to sustenance, to food, water, to safe and clean habitat, to security and ecological space. These rights are natural rights, they are birthrights given by the fact of existence on earth and should be protected through the community rights and commons. They are not given by states or corporations nor can they be extinguished by state or corporate control.

Localization of economics is a social and ecological imperative based on vibrant, resilient local economies, which support national and global economies. The global economy should not crush and destroy local economies. It should be based on earth-centered and community-centered knowledge systems. Living knowledge is knowledge that maintains and renews living processes and contributes to the health of the planet and people. Living knowledge is a commons; it belongs collectively to communities that create it and keep it alive. All humans have a duty to share knowledge. Rights are derived from and balanced with responsibility. Those who bear the consequences of decisions and actions should be the decision makers. Living economies connect people in circles of care, cooperation and compassion instead of dividing them through competition and conflict. Together we can globalize compassion, not greed; peace, not war.

It is the common attitude of the American people to regard the environment as a non-issue that has no effect on our lives and which we, in turn, have no effect on. We perpetually fail to recognize the enmeshed threads that bind the fate of nature to our own, like individual strands in a spider’s web. What we fail to see is that this problem is one that is perpetuated by countless lone persons whose individual choices change the world every day. It’s not irrational to think that we can make a difference or that we can change the course we are on, what is truly unrealistic is the idea that we can continue to squander our resources and pillage our planet and think that there will always be an earth for us to live on.

Recommended Reading:

1. “Top 200: The Rise of Corporate Global Power” by Sarah Anderson and John Cavanagh
2. “Natural Capitalism” by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins
3. “Can’t See the Forest” by Josh Sevin
4. “Global Issues: An Introduction” by John L. Seitz
5. “Global Environmental Issues” by Frances Harris
6. “Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth” by Mathis Wakernagel and William Rees
7. “Welcome to my Jungle...before it’s gone--Rainforests--Statistical Data Included” by Karen de Seve
8. “Davos 07: the Sound of the City” by Ken Livingstone
9. “Congo, Coltan, Conflict” by Benjamin-Todd
10. “Why Consumption Matters” by Betsy Taylor
11. “Journal of Retailing” by Victor Lebow
12. “Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescene in America” by Giles Slad, Harvard University Press (2007)
13. “Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut” by David Shenk
14. “Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace” by Vandana Shiva, South End Press (2005)

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