p. 11 #
This is the thing about ecology: everything is interconnected. It’s difficult for us to grasp how this works, because we’re used to thinking of the world in terms of individual parts rather than complex wholes. In fact, that’s even how we’ve been taught to think of ourselves - as individuals. We’ve forgotten how to pay attention to the relationships between things. Insects necessary for pollination; birds that control crop pests, grubs and worms essential to soil fertility; mangroves that purify water; the corals on which fish populations depend: these living systems are not ‘out there’, disconnected from humanity. On the contrary: our fates are intertwined. They are, in a real sense, us.
Since I read this book (and Gosh work as well), I’ve been thinking about this a lot and more than answers I have questions. One in particular: how can close this gap? We’re so obviously not disconnected from the rest of the living creatures of this planet!
p. 35 #
The point here is that the Industrial Revolution – and Europe’s industrial growth – did not emerge ex nihilo. It hinged on commodities that were produced by slaves, on lands stolen from colonised peoples, and processed in factories staffed by European peasants who had been forcibly dispossessed by enclosure. We tend to think of these as separate processes, but they all operated with the same underlying logic. Enclosure was a process of internal colonisation, and colonisation was a process of enclosure. Europe’s peasants were dispossessed from their lands just as Indigenous Americans were (although, notably, the latter were treated much worse, excluded from the realm of rights, and even humanity, altogether). And the slave trade is nothing if not the enclosure and colonisation of bodies – bodies that were appropriated for the sake of surplus accumulation just as land was, and treated as property in the same way. It might be tempting to downplay these moments of violence as mere aberrations in the history of capitalism. But they are not. They are the foundations of it. Growth has always relied on processes of colonisation.
Concisely written, I often share this one with people.
p. 90 #
So where does that extra money come from, if it doesn’t actually exist? Banks create it out of thin air when they credit your account. They literally loan it into existence. More than 90% of the money that’s presently circulating in our economy is created in this manner. In other words, almost every single dollar that passes through our hands represents somebody’s debt. And this debt has to be paid back with interest – with more work, more extraction and more production. This is extraordinary, when you think about it. It means that banks effectively sell a product (money) that they produce out of nothing, for free, and then require people to go out into the real world and extract and produce real value to pay for it. It is so outlandish as to offend common sense. People have a difficult time believing it could possibly be true. As Henry Ford put it in the 1930s: ‘It is perhaps well enough that the people of the nation do not know or understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.’
The obvious conclusion here is that no financial product that people can speculate on (or, how I like to say, “make money with money”) should be legal.
p. 159 #
What’s so fascinating about this is that it shows widespread and intuitive support for what ecological economists call a ‘steady-state’ economy. A steady-state economy follows two key principles in order to stay in balance with the living world:
- Never extract more than ecosystems can regenerate.
- Never waste or pollute more than ecosystems can safely absorb.
To get to a steady-state economy, we need to have clear caps on resource use and waste. For decades, economists have told us that such caps are impossible, because people will see them as irrational. It turns out they’re wrong. If given the chance, this is exactly the kind of policy that people want.
What I find incredible here is the simplicity of the proposal. I can imagine most people would go “this is impossible” and I think that’s the biggest challenge. The ruling class has colonised people’s imagination to the point that they can’t imagine a world without capitalism. It’s easier to imagine a world without humans than one without capitalism.