Part One: Abundance and Scarcity Thinking for the Environment

Reading:

Excerpt from Scarcity or abundance? A debate on the environment by Meyers and Simon, 1994

Key Dilemmas of Part One

Abundance and diversity are indications of public ecosystem health. However, economic wealth is correlated with the private accumulation of resources that increase their value with scarcity and demand. Can these two seemingly opposed values be reconciled?

Modern civilization had created an industrial-technological dream world for some people, while keeping others in a real world of utter poverty an ecological collapse. Can these conflicting worlds be reconciled?

Review of List of Navigation Strategies for Seemingly Intractable Conflicts, Differences, and Dilemmas:

Questions:

1. What is the distinction between natural value and artificial value?

We, as civilized humans can value both nature as a value, and money as a value. However, money is not found in nature. Though the paper, used as currency, is found in nature, money can be represented in non-nature ways, such as the value of one’s bank account of one’s debt. So money is representational or artificial value. However, both nature and representation can have power over or with us. Money, in capitalist societies, represents power over humans and power over nature.\

Although, humans may wish to live in harmony with nature; they cannot live in harmony with money because the power-over that money represents is constantly being contested in the market of supply and demand, as well as the interests of the wealthy over the interests of the less-than-wealthy. Generally, the wealthy compete for more money and power, and the less-than-wealthy compete for shrinking opportunities and shrinking public services. In this competition for money and power, nature is continually exploited and diminished as a resource to generate more money.

Bluntly, the current version of global capitalism depends on endless growth for endless profit, and endless aggregation of wealth by a small percentage of the population. On the other hand, living in harmony with nature requires a commitment to diverse and flourishing ecosystems. If one commits oneself to living in harmony with nature, one needs to commit materially to such flourishing by minimizing measurable harm, and maximizing measurable flourishing.

2. What are the connections between abundance, scarcity, and violence against nature?

Ecosystems that are diverse and healthy are the definition of natural abundance. Ecosystems that have a narrower range of diversity and show signs of illness are the definition of natural scarcity. Certain “indicator species” can mirror the overall health of an ecosystem. For Native American tribes, near where I live in the Portland area, the salmon are sacred, as they are an indicator species for the river ecosystem. Not surprisingly, some species of salmon are becoming scarce, illustrating the sicknesses of our local river ecosystem.

Any violation of the imperative to seek and maintain harmony with nature is violence against nature, intentional or inadvertent. The suffering of nature reflects the human tendency to soil its own nest, while in pursuit of artificial or economic abundance. Economic abundance is the experience of wealth, power, success, and security. Economic scarcity is the experience of poverty, powerlessness, failure, and insecurity.

The challenge, here, is how to limit the extremes of wealth and power, while investing in ways to bring people out of poverty and help them achieve power. If this is done effectively, then we will have a society of power-with each other, and abundance-with each other. The complication is that there must also be a commitment to ecosystem abundance, or all of us will face the insecurity of a dying planet. Wealth, alone, will not address this insecurity, as there is no refuge from runaway greenhouse gases.

3. What are the perils and positives to the use of abundance and scarcity thinking

“Your illusions are a part of you like your bones and flesh and memory.” (William Faulkner in Absalom, Absalom!)

To answer question, above, we must first accept that humans live in a dream world, whereas species in natural ecosystems live in a natural world. Those of us who reside in civilization have created an artificial and virtual world that we have come to accept as abundant and healthy, but in ecosystem terms, may be a nightmare. Those who live in nature, dream of nature; those who live in civilization, dream of civilization. These dreams, and the identities that spring from them, tend to define us. Only when we step out into the wilderness, do our civilized identities seem inadequate and inaccurate. If we stay in nature long enough, we restart our propensity of dreams of nature.

Personal Story: When I’m out in the wilderness (not often enough!), I feel like the real me. Outside of the wilderness, I’m someone else—sort of me, but not the fully real me. I feel connected to nature within a deeply spiritual—even mystical—experience. This is sometimes called the “three day effect.” Because I am not trained to live off of the land in any sustainable way, I cannot feel fully secure in the wilderness environment, but there are people who are trained to live in nature sustainably, with few compromises with civilization. Native Americans, before colonialism, generally thrived in harmony with nature, though they were periodically victimized by natural scarcities and cataclysms. Some natives and non-natives have returned to early tribal ways of living, finding great wisdom in tribal traditions.

On the other end of the spectrum, some tribes have been forced to erode their harmony with nature to live in the capitalist economy. I once met a Native American who helped Northwest tribes improve their forestry practices. I asked her if the tribes’ traditional practice of planning for the next seven generations made her work easier. Shockingly, she said tribes have too often been responsible for environmental abuse, like logging on steep terrain, where it would be difficult to regrow trees. She explained that economic pressures on tribes force them to extract natural resources at an accelerated pace.

From the point of contact between colonist Europeans and indigenous Native Americans, there were five major impacts: the spread of genocidal diseases, genocidal war, cultural genocide, economic dislocation, and transforming nature and land into private property which became the means of producing the accoutrements of civilization. The impacts dramatically reduced the number of Native Americans and undermined their successful adaptation to, what was a generally abundant environment. Colonialism changed America from a land, where the ethos was to maintain harmony with nature, to a land where nature was transformed into mere resources for the rise of civilization. The native ethic of engaging nature, in the collaborative spirit of abundant mutual aid, was transformed into dominating nature in what was to become Darwin’s notion of nature as scarcity-driven mutual struggle.

Other Voices: Pyotr Kropotkin (scientist and anarchist) opposed the Darwinian claim that “the struggle for the means of existence, of every animal against all its congeners (own species), and of every man against all other men, was ‘a law of Nature’. This view, however, I could not accept, because I was persuaded that to admit a pitiless inner war for life within each species, and to see in that war a condition of progress, was to admit something which not only had not yet been proved, but also lacked confirmation from direct observation. On the contrary, a lecture “on the Law of Mutual Aid,” which was delivered at a Russian Congress of Naturalists, in January 1880, by the well-known zoologist, Professor Kessler, the then Dean of the St. Petersburg University, struck me as throwing a new light on the whole subject. Kessler’s idea was that besides the law of Mutual Struggle, there is in Nature the law of Mutual Aid, which, for the success of the struggle for life, and especially for the progressive evolution of the species, is far more important than the law of mutual contest.” As Professor Kessler died a year after presenting his lecture, Kropotkin further developed Kessler’s idea in his book, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902)

4. What is the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic (instrumental) values?

Some people, like Native Americans, believe that nature has intrinsic value, where each organic, or inorganic form, has value in-and-of itself, just as humans have value in-and-of ourselves. Both nature and humanity has a right to exist, and not be carelessly destroyed. Other people believe that nature only has extrinsic or instrumental value. In other words, nature is only valuable if it is instrumental in creating value for humans.

A way to reconcile these two diverging beliefs is to suggest that if natural ecosystems become unhealthy, and runaway greenhouse gases threaten the life of the planet, then unbridled use of nature for human ends will prove to be catastrophic for humans and nature. On this view, it may not make any difference whether we believe nature has intrinsic or extrinsic value; what matters is that ecosystems flourish and that greenhouse gases are halted and reversed, so that both humans and nature can survive sustainably.