Denial

Faced with the predictions of the impacts of global warming on our society, the most natural and easiest answer is denial. Some deny the fact itself that global warming is happening, or the scientific consensus that it is almost certainly caused by human emissions of green-house gases. Other recognize the overwhelming evidence, but find a variety of reasons not to act (to quote Mark Lynas: "I am not the main cause of this problem", "nothing I do makes much difference", "It is too difficult for me to change my behavior", etc...), which is a more subtle form of denial. Mark Lynas pushes the analysis even further:

"In a wider sense, one could argue that the whole economic system of modern Western society is founded on denial, in particular the denial of resource limitations. Schoolchildren are taught - and Nobel Prize-winning economics professors apparently still believe - that Earth-provided resources, from iron ore to fisheries, come into the category of "free goods", appearing as if by magic at the start of the economic process. These free goods, which include all the ecosystem services that support the human species, are considered financially valueless and left out of conventional economic accounting. The standard gross domestic product (GDP) measuring stick of national economic success totals up the values of production and consumption without considering the sustainability of the process. In a master stroke of creative accounting, conventional economic theory therefore counts the depletion of resources as an accumulation of wealth. This logic is analogous to individuals spending all of the money in their current account and counting it as income - an absurdity, but one that underpins our entire economy.
Bearing this societal dysfunction in mind, it is perhaps rather unfair to blame individuals for not facing up to climate change when the whole weight of economy and society effectively prevents them from doing so. Bob Dylan once sang about how the white Southerner who shot the black civil rights leader Medgar Evers in 1963 was "just a pawn in their game". So are we all, pawns in the game of global warming. But we are not entirely powerless, nor entirely blameless. The collective hand that moves these pawns is our own."

Mark Lynas, Six degrees - our future on a hotter planet, chapter "Choosing our future".

So there is no excuse not to act! We have some powerful tools to affect the collective hand: our votes, and our consumption patterns.

Les vrais alarmistes

"Les scientifiques ont été accusés pendant des années d'être des alarmistes. Mais les vrais alarmistes, ce sont ceux qui disent que l'on ne peut engager une action pour le climat car cela ralentirait la croissance économique".

Ban Ki-moon, secrétaire général de l'ONU, 3e Conférence de l'ONU sur le climat, jeudi 3 septembre 2009 (rapporté par Le Monde).

Good private property and bad private property

"As regards private property, the first and most basic distinction is between (a) property that is an aid to creative work and (b) property that is an alternative to it. There is something natural and healthy about the former - the private property of the working proprietor; and there is something unnatural and unhealthy about the latter - the private property of the passive owner who lives parasitically on the work of others."

E. F. Schumacher, Small is beautiful.

Ego and consumerism

"Ego-identification with things creates attachment to things, obsession with things, which in turn creates our consumer society and economic structures where the only measure of progress is always more. The unchecked striving for more, for endless growth, is a dysfunction and a disease. It is the same dysfunction the cancerous cell manifests, whose only goal is to multiply itself, unaware that it is bringing about its own destruction by destroying the organism of which it is a part. [...]
The physical needs for food, water, shelter, clothing, and basic comforts could be easily met for all humans on the planet, were it not for the imbalance of resources created by the insane and rapacious need for more, the greed of the ego. It finds collective expression in the economic structures of this world, such as the huge corporations, which are egoic entities that compete with each other for more. Their only blind aim is profit. They pursue that aim with absolute ruthlessness. Nature, animals, people, even their own employees, are no more than digits on a balance sheet, lifeless objects to be used, then discarded."

Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth - Awakening to your life's purpose, chapter "Ego: the current state of humanity".

Neither doomed, nor saved by the "invisible hand"

"The world is facing enormous ecological and environmental problems, but running out of natural resources is not the right way to describe the threat. Earth has the energy, land, biodiversity, and water resources needed to feed humanity and support long-term economic prosperity for all. The problem is that markets might not lead to their wise and sustainable use. There is no economic imperative that will condemn us to deplete our vital resource base, but neither is there an invisible hand that will prevent us from doing so. The choice will be ours to make through public policy and global cooperation."

Jeffrey Sachs, Common Wealth, Economics for a crowded planet, chapter "Our crowded planet".

R & D financing

"When R & D* is aimed mainly for general scientific knowledge, the needs of the poor, the global commons, or rapid social uptake, public financing is advantageous compared with reliance on patents. When R & D is targeted mainly for the rich or private use or gradual uptake, the patent-based incentives are relatively advantageous. In general, a healthy innovation system will use a mix of public financing and patents. For global sustainable development, the mix of public financing and private incentives should be harmonized globally to ensure that the needs of the poor and the global commons are properly addressed and financed by shared contributions of the world's governments."

Jeffrey Sachs, Common Wealth, Economics for a crowded planet, chapter "Our crowded planet".

* Research and Development

Economics needs a scientific revolution

Today, I read in last week's issue of Nature an excellent short essay about economics science, written by Jean-Philippe Bouchaud, head of research of Capital Fund Management and a physics professor at École Polytechnique in France. Extracts :

"Compared with physics, it seems fair to say that the quantitative success of the economic sciences has been disappointing. Rockets fly to the Moon; energy is extracted from minute changes of atomic mass. What is the flagship achievement of economics? Only its recurrent inability to predict and avert crises, including the current worldwide credit crunch.

Why is this so? Of course, to paraphrase Isaac Newton, modelling the madness of people is more difficult than modelling the motion of planets. But statistical regularities should emerge in the behaviour of large populations, just as the law of ideal gases emerges from the chaotic motion of individual molecules. To me, the crucial difference between modelling in physics and in economics lies rather in how the fields treat the relative role of concepts, equations and empirical data.

Classical economics is built on very strong assumptions that quickly become axioms: the rationality of economic agents (the premise that every economic agent, be that a person or a company, acts to maximize his profits), the 'invisible hand' (that agents, in the pursuit of their own profit, are led to do what is best for society as a whole) and market efficiency (that market prices faithfully reflect all known information about assets), for example. An economist once told me, to my bewilderment: "These concepts are so strong that they supersede any empirical observation." As economist Robert Nelson argued in his book, Economics as Religion (Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 2002), the marketplace has been deified.

Physicists, on the other hand, have learned to be suspicious of axioms. If empirical observation is incompatible with a model, the model must be trashed or amended, even if it is conceptually beautiful or mathematically convenient. So many accepted ideas have been proven wrong in the history of physics that physicists have grown to be critical and queasy about their own models. [...]

The supposed omniscience and perfect efficacy of a free market stems from economic work done in the 1950s and 1960s, which with hindsight looks more like propaganda against communism than plausible science. In reality, markets are not efficient, humans tend to be over-focused in the short-term and blind in the long-term, and errors get amplified, ultimately leading to collective irrationality, panic and crashes. Free markets are wild markets. [...]

Surprisingly, classical economics has no framework through which to understand 'wild' markets, even though their existence is so obvious to the layman. Physics, on the other hand, has developed several models that explain how small perturbations can lead to wild effects. The theory of complexity shows that although a system may have an optimum state, it is sometimes so hard to identify that the system never settles there. This optimum state is not only elusive, it is also hyper-fragile to small changes in the environment, and therefore often irrelevant to understanding what is going on. There are good reasons to believe that this paradigm should apply to economic systems in general and financial markets in particular. We need to break away from classical economics and develop completely different tools. Some behavioural economists and econo-physicists are attempting to do this now, in a patchy way, but their fringe endeavour is not taken seriously by mainstream economics.

While work is done to enhance models, regulation also needs to improve. Innovations in financial products should be scrutinized, crash-tested against extreme scenarios outside the realm of current models and approved by independent agencies, just as we have done with other potentially lethal industries (chemical, pharmaceutical, aerospace, nuclear energy).

Crucially, the mindset of those working in economics and financial engineering needs to change. Economics curricula need to include more natural science. The prerequisites for more stability in the long run are the development of a more pragmatic and realistic representation of what is going on in financial markets, and to focus on data, which should always supersede perfect equations and aesthetic axioms."

Ils sont fous ces économistes !

"Mon premier contact avec le problème de la consommation d'énergie globale remonte à la fin des années 1950. L'un de nos enseignants, Philip Morrison, professeur de physique à l'université Cornell aux États-Unis, est arrivé brandissant, furieux, une copie du New York Times : « Ils sont complètement inconscients ces économistes : ils annoncent fièrement la progression prodigieuse et prolongée du produit national brut de la nation. À ce taux, disent-ils, nous doublerons notre consommation d'énergie à l'échelle mondiale en moins de dix ans ! Ils n'ont pas l'air de réaliser qu'à ce rythme nous consommerons dans cent cinquante ans autant d'énergie que le Soleil et dans mille ans autant que toutes les galaxies de l'univers ! »

Hubert Reeves, Mal de Terre, chapitre "Quelles énergies pour demain ?"

Des biens indispensables

"Selon moi, la structure économique de l'Inde et, par conséquent, celle du monde devrait être telle que personne ne pût souffrir d'insuffisance alimentaire ou d'un manque de vêtements. En d'autres termes, chacun devrait avoir assez de travail pour être à même de joindre les deux bouts. Et cet idéal ne peut être universellement atteint que si les moyens de production des biens indispensables à la vie restent sous le contrôle des masses. Ces biens devraient rester librement à la disposition de tous, comme il en est, ou du moins comme il devrait en être, de l'air et de l'eau que Dieu nous donne. Ces richesses ne devraient jamais être l'occasion d'une spéculation destinée à exploiter les autres. Il faudrait décréter injuste la monopolisation de ces biens par un groupe de pays, une nation ou une association de personnes. La négligence de ce principe élémentaire est cause de la misère à laquelle nous assistons aujourd'hui, non seulement dans cet infortuné pays, mais aussi en d'autres points du globe."

Mohandas Gandhi, Tous les hommes sont frères, chapitre "La pauvreté au coeur de l'abondance".

Travail et richesse

Après un post critiquant la théorie de Marx, je dois avouer que je n'ai pas dû comprendre ce qu'il racontait dans Le Capital, et dois lui faire justice:

"Le travail n'est pas la source de toute richesse. La nature est tout autant la source des valeurs d'usage (et c'est bien en cela que consiste la richesse matérielle !) que le travail, qui n'est lui-même que la manifestation d'une force naturelle, la force de travail humaine."

Karl Marx, Critique du programme de Gotha.

Ma confusion doit venir des différentes valeurs, d'usage vs d'échange, dont il fait la distinction dans Le Capital.
Il faudra donc que je le relise plus attentivement (et jusqu'au bout) un jour...

More humility

One last quotation I wanted to put from Paul Hawken:

"Our comfort and abundance is the foundation for the great differences we see in public debate and private discussions about the environment. From business and government, we are presented with the concerned but optimistic "so far, so good" assessment, a school of thought that biologist E. O. Wilson calls exemptionalist. This line of thinking relies on the ability of human beings to overcome ecological "laws" through invention, ingenuity, and gumption. For every problem presented by environmentalists, optimists have an answer: desalinization, fusion, deep-sea mining, space, and bio-engineering. Their conjectures are easier to swallow than the alarmist voices of environmentalists who say we are outstripping the earth's means to sustain the human species. Ever since the Reverend Thomas Malthus wrote his "Essay on Population" in 1798, there has been a dispute as to when or whether humankind would exceed the capacity of the earth to provide our daily bread. Books such as Limits to Growth and The Population Bomb have enlivened the controversy, not only because they were based on research and science, but because the arguments were made forcefully and dramatically. The concept of doomsday has always had a perverse appeal, waking us from our humdrum existence to the allure of a future harrowing drama. Yet another view held by a small group of writers and journalists (very few scientists, however) proclaims that environmentalism is a hoax, that we have been unnecessarily frightened, that environmentalism is a delusional scam from the political fringes to coerce others into a liberal agenda. A large and anxious audience is quite ready to wake one morning and find that, much like the thermonuclear cold war, our environmental bad dream is over, the opposing sides having made peace, and that we needn't worry anymore.
The view I choose is this: The underlying principles informing such cautionary predictions are largely correct, while the timing and nature of humankind's destiny with earthly limits is still unknown. This means that the optimists who say we will be taken care of in the future will be correct for the time being, until the day they are wrong, when we will all be in big trouble. The environmentalists, warning of impending catastrophe, will usually be wrong with regard to specific predictions, but are right in principle. What does this tell us ? It suggests we find a path of existence that honors both camps; that recognizes limits while using our innovative capacity to invent and reimagine our world to increase eficiency, decrease harm, improve our existence. In other words, we need to create an economy and way of relating to our material world that is not an either/or argument, but a means to create the best life for the greatest number of people precisely because we do not know the eventual outcome or impact of our current industrial practices. In other words, we need an economy based on more humility."

Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce. A Declaration of Sustainability. (Chapter "The inestimable gift of a future").

Tragedy of the commons

"Biologist Garret Hardin's now-famous metaphor for the deterioration or "tragedy" of the global commons begins with the notion of a pasture open to everyone in a given village. In such a situation, the herder who overgrazes the most benefits the most, and the person who grazes a herd that consumes only his "share" of the pasture's yield is effectively penalized. But eventually the entire pasture deteriorates. In this case, when overgrazing becomes the "rational" norm, you are punished for doing the right thing, rewarded for the wrong, and all suffer in the end. This outcome fulfills what philosophers going back to Aristotle have foreseen: "What is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it." Hardin's pasture, however, is not technically about a commons, but an "open access" system where anyone is free to take as much as they want. Commons have historically been extremely well controlled and regulated by the communities to which they belonged; not until colonization and industrialization have they been widely degraded and destroyed.
Nevertheless, the solution to Hardin's dilemma of a deteriorating open access system would be a pasture utility, one that operated independently of the specific grazing and herding needs of the villagers. The utility would be managed to maximize income from grazing fees, and therefore would have no economic interest in overgrazing, since any form of degradation would reduce the value of the utility to its owners. The pasture utility would monitor usage by grazers so that income was maximized. The utility would pay careful and constant attention to yield, growth, rotation, and fencing. The commons would not deteriorate under such a guardianship, and the natural predilection to overgraze would be thwarted.
The pasture utility is a useful model for a mechanism to guard our own commons, whether local or global. Such a utility can maximize the strenghts of both the private and public sectors, without succumbing to the failings of either. Utilities are hybrid enterprises because they combine two unusual features. First, they are regulated by their constituencies through public utility commissions or other forms of public sector input. In return for accepting regulation, they are given monopolies and are guaranteed a certain level of profit. In other words, by allowing some form of public control, they receive a guaranteed return on their investment, a relationship that allows them to create and execute long-term projects, and attract capital while paying low interest rates."

Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce. A Declaration of Sustainability. (Chapter "Pink salmon and green fees").

An example of such a utility would be the Earth Atmospheric Trust (see also this post) for the global commons that our atmosphere is, and where the utility members would be every person on Earth !

Strategic planning

Below is the fundamental argument I made to myself long before reading Paul Hawken's book, that made me choose my position regarding global warming even if, as a scientist in an Earth science, oceanography, I know too well that the models that are used to predict climate have too coarse resolutions and sometimes questionable parameterizations of the unresolved processes:

"From a strategic point of view, the choice is clear. Whenever you are faced with two different paths, each with its uncertainties and unknowns, the cardinal rule in strategic planning is to take the path that allows you to shift to the other path should your initial decision prove wrong. As futurist Peter Schwartz advises in his book The Art of the Long View, choose the option that gives you the most options in the future. Even granting status-quo defenders their argument that we know too little about global warming to warrant changing from a hydrocarbon- to a solar-based economy, even granting them their dream that technology will come up with ingenious ways to solve many of the problems with the innate toxicity of hydrocarbons, maintaining the present course is a mistake.
If we continue on the same path and find out forty, fifty, or one hundred years from now that the scientific projections about global warming were correct, it may be too late to mount an effective counter-strategy. On the other hand, if we choose to make the transition to an economy that runs on perpetual solar income and we later find out the CO2 buildup was less a problem than anticipated, we are still ahead on every count. We have eliminated hundreds of billions of tons of pollution from the air, ground, and water, and improved health worldwide. We have engendered a myriad of new, safer, and friendlier technologies to replace those deposed. We have not poisoned the planet or our bodies with the toxins produced in a hydrocarbon-based economy. We have created hundreds of thousands of new companies and many more jobs than we lost, while moving toward a world whose work and money are infused with meaning and vision, toward a just and constructive future. Plus we will still have all of the coal and oil that we didn't burn up, extending the life of current reserves far into the future of humankind."

Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce. A Declaration of Sustainability. (Chapter "Pink salmon and green fees").

Good design

Here is the follow-up on the previous post.

"In any endeavor, good design resides in two principles. First, it changes the least number of elements to achieve the greatest result. Second, it removes stress from a system rather than adding it. Bad design is pinning our hopes for environmental and cultural survival on a change in human consciousness and behavior alone, because we therefore depend on the highest number of uncontrollable elements--people--to undergo a great change. Likewise, bad design is having to institute several hundred thousand rules and restrictions under the jurisdiction of the government and expecting business to know them all, much less obey them.
Good design makes things easier and simpler. Good design seems natural, unaffected, and appeals to common sense. Good design for the commercial system accounts for and appeals to the innate behavioral modes of both governance and commerce. Let governance govern with a minimum of intrusion and with a genuinely "conservative" approach; let business be business at its best: humane and creative and efficient.
One of the ways to further this goal is to invert the old values and reverse the traditional cost-price incentives. We need a predictable and consistent market that recognizes the true, full costs of doing business and reassigns them to the marketplace, where they belong. We require a market economy that rewards the highest internalized cost, an economy in which business prospers when it is responsible both socially and ecologically. We need business to thrive by exceeding regulatory standards rather than by challenging or circumventing them. Businesses should literally compete to be more ecological, not only on moral or ethical grounds or because it is "the right thing to do", but because such behavior squarely aligns with their bottom line. In short, we must design a marketplace that obviates acts of environmental destruction by making them extremely expensive, and rewards restorative acts by bringing them within our means. If we do this, environmental restoration, economic prosperity, job creation, and social stability will become equivalent."

Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce. A Declaration of Sustainability. (Chapter "Restoring the guardian").

Competition vs. cooperation (again)

Sorry to always come back to the same subjects, but the purpose of this blog is to gather a data base of quotations from my readings on the subjects I like.

"The concept that one business succeeds because another does not is part of the same thinking that has created the dichotomy between consumer and customer. But, in fact, there is a large and overwhelming body of evidence demonstrating that competition in human culture, whether it be in business or other endeavors, does not improve the species, but is maladaptive and far from being the most intelligent cultural strategy. The country we admire, fear, and dislike the most in economic matters is Japan, a country that places an unusually high, even extraordinary emphasis on cooperation, collaboration, and harmony. That does not mean that Japanese companies do not compete, but it does mean that they do so within the larger cultural imperative of harmony. One of the reasons we in this culture compete actually has nothing to do with business, but rather is the addiction to winning, to beating an opponent. If the purpose of this competition and winning is an enlarged ego system, then it goes without saying that we will pursue it endlessly because, as all winners know, the joy is short-lived, the hunger endless. A restorative economy will have as its hallmark a business community that coevolves with the natural and human communities it serves. This necessitates a high degree of cooperation, mutual support, and collaborative problem-solving. It depends on very different skill-sets than those that are being drummed into us in sports, movies, and business schools. Competition for the consumer or between businesses is impractical, wasteful, expensive and degrading to all involved. It imitates an immature ecosystem, and in this day and age, that is retrogressive, not progressive."

Paul Hawken, in The ecology of commerce. A declaration of sustainability, chapter "The opportunity of insignificance".

Hope (2)

"Business must change its perspective and its propaganda, which has successfully portrayed the idea of "limits" as a pejorative concept. Limits and prosperity are intimately linked. Respecting limits means respecting the fact that the world and its minutiae are diverse beyond our comprehension and highly organized for their own ends, and that all facets connect in ways which are sometimes obvious, and at other times mysterious and complex. If our economy is "limited" by inclusion as part of the greater closed system of nature, those limits are no more necessarily constricting to a sound economy than a blank canvas was to Cézanne or a flute to Jean-Pierre Rampal. The natural world of sunlight, rainfall, and photosynthesis, of topsoil and coral reefs, of raptor birds and tropical fishes, of stamens and pistils and genes is a limit which can be circumvented only at the cost of the world itself. It is precisely in the discipline imposed by the limitations of nature that we discover and imagine our lives. It is only in the fullest context of the world as it is presented to us, and not as we manipulate it, that we may celebrate our humanity and create true prosperity. Such perspectives can lead us to a very different type of economy and way of doing business, one that will be healthier for all species, not only the butterfly and the owl, but our own."

Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce. A Declaration of Sustainability. (Chapter "The death of birth").

Ecological emergency (2)

"This is the ecological perspective of the industrial age; we cannot hold onto it indefinitely, in fact, industrialism itself may not last for even one more human lifetime. At present, to compensate for the limitations placed on production by the carrying capacity of the environment, we are speeding up the rate at which we fish, farm, deforest, and extract. In other words, rather than facing the creative challenges posed by ecosystem limits, we are temporarily bypassing the problem by harvesting resources more rapidly, by driftnetting, mechanical deforestation, and factory farming. Science and common sense both dictate that such extravagance must eventually lead to disaster. It not only borrows from the future, thus threatening human societies in the long term, but it also puts intense pressure on other species in these ecological niches which depend on the same resources. As a consequence, habitats are destroyed, species become extinct, and in the process, the productive health of the environment is compromised and decreased.
Human populations are already being severely affected by damage to the environment due to depletion and degradation of resources. For decades, scientists and experts such as Robert Heilbroner, Paul Ehrlich, and Jessica Tuchman Matthews have predicted that resource shortages would engender widespread social discord, but there were no studies to support or refute those views. Recently, however, a team of thirty researchers, assembled under the auspices of the University of Toronto and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, formed the Project on Environmental Change and Acute Conflict. This group examined a number of societies and countries where resource shortages were already occurring, and their findings were disturbing: «Scarcities of renewable resources are already contributing to violent conflicts in many parts of the developing world. These conflicts may foreshadow a surge of similar violence in coming decades, particularly in poor countries where shortages of water, forests and, especially, fertile land, coupled with rapidly expanding populations, already cause great hardship.» Land shortages in Bangladesh, for example, have led to mass migrations to India involving as many as 15 million people. These migrations have in turn led to fierce ethnic clashes. To those who discount such theories by arguing that resource conflicts have been an enduring element of human history, the authors warn: «We maintain ... that renewable-resource scarcities of the next 50 years will probably occur with a speed, complexity and magnitude unprecedented in history. Entire countries can now be deforested in a few decades, most of a region's topsoil can disappear in a generation, and acute ozone depletion may take place in as few as 20 years.»"

Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce. A Declaration of Sustainability.
(Chapter "The death of birth").

It is worth noting that the Project on Environmental Change and Acute Conflict was taking place in 1990-1993, just after the Montreal Protocol, which regulated the emissions of ozone-depleting substances worldwide, entered into force (on January 1, 1989). Since then, the atmospheric concentrations of the most important ozone-depleting substances have either leveled off or decreased, resulting in a stabilization of the global average amount of ozone depletion, and the ozone layer is expected to begin to recover in coming decades, assuming full compliance with the Montreal Protocol (according to the wikipedia article on ozone depletion).
This is a good example when proper international coordination and regulation can solve a problem generated by human activities but detected and warned-against by science, and finally taken care of by public and political will.
Why would we not be able to do the same for the green-house gases and the environmental degradation our economy is inflicting to our world ?
Are the above-mentioned threats perceived as more benign than the skin cancers associated with the ozone hole ? That would be a very short-term perception !

Issues... and solutions

"Business has three basic issues to face: what it takes, what it makes, and what it wastes, and the three are intimately connected. First, business takes too much from the environment and does so in a harmful way; second, the products it makes require excessive amounts of energy, toxins, and pollutants; and finally, the method of manufacture and the very products themselves produce extraordinary waste and cause harm to present and future generations of all species including humans.
The solution for all three dilemmas are three fundamental principles that govern nature. First, waste equals food. In nature, detritus is constantly recycled to nourish other systems with a minimum of energy and inputs. We call ourselves consumers, but the problem is that we do not consume. Each person in America produces twice his weight per day in household, hazardous, and industrial waste, and an additional half-ton per week when gaseous wastes such as carbon dioxide are included. An ecological model of commerce would imply that all waste have value to other modes of production so that everything is either reclaimed, reused, or recycled. Second, nature runs off of current solar income. The only input into the closed system of the earth is the sun. Last, nature depends on diversity, thrives on differences, and perishes in the imbalance of uniformity. Healthy systems are highly varied and specific to time and place. Nature is not mass-produced."

Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce. A Declaration of Sustainability.
(Chapter "A teasing irony").

Un autre mode

"«Le modèle de développement suivi par tous les pays jusqu'à aujourd'hui est fondamentalement non durable, au-delà des arguties qui entourent le concept de développement durable. Ce développement fait en effet largement appel à la disposition d'une énergie bon marché, essentiellement tirée des combustibles fossiles. On sait bien que la quantité disponible à des coûts raisonnables est finie et ne permettra pas le développement prévisible de tous les pays de la planète pendant beaucoup plus d'un siècle. Le changement climatique induit par l'émisssion dans l'atmosphère du gaz carbonique résultant de la combustion des ressources fossiles conduit à envisager sérieusement des échéances beaucoup plus proches: c'est un problème dont l'importance à l'échelle de quelques decennies est largement admise.» Ces lignes ne sont pas d'un gauchiste irresponsable. Elles sont signées par l'un des experts français du très officiel Groupe d'experts intergouvernementaux sur l'évolution du climat (Giec), mis en place par l'Organisation météorologique mondiale et le programme des Nations Unies pour l'environnement: Michel Petit, membre du Conseil général des technologies de l'information, qui fut longtemps le directeur de la recherche de l'École polytechnique.
Dès lors, il faut que la modernité choisisse ce qui lui est le plus essentiel: son exigence éthique d'égalité, qui débouche sur des principes d'universalisation, ou bien le mode de développement qu'elle s'est donné. On ne peut à la fois vouloir conserver son morceau de gâteau et le manger. Ou bien le monde actuellement développé s'isole, ce qui voudra dire de plus en plus qu'il se protège par des boucliers de toutes sortes contre les agressions que le ressentiment des laissés-pour-compte concevra chaque fois plus cruelles et plus abominables; ou bien s'invente un autre mode de rapport au monde, à la nature, aux choses et aux êtres, qui aura la propriété de pouvoir être universalisé à l'échelle de l'Humanité."

Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Pour un catastrophisme éclairé. Quand l'impossible est certain, cité par Bernard Maris dans l'Antimanuel d'économie. 2. Les cigales, chapitre "Économie et écologie ou comment «j'ai tué Maman»".

Croissance et développement

"Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen a eu le mérite de montrer, peut-être le premier, qu'il n'y avait aucun lien entre croissance et développement. Tout dépend du contenu de la croissance. Non seulement les adversaires de la croissance ne sont pas des ennemis du développement, mais ils sont sans doute les meilleurs défenseurs de la civilisation, l'autre nom du développement. La croissance économique, en revanche, relève de l'illimité, de l'avancée sans fin, de l'impossible. Elle est un rêve infantile: l'enfant cesse d'en être un lorsqu'il apprend à renoncer au giron maternel et qu'il entre dans le monde fini du possible. Le capitalisme est bien une régression infantile."

Bernard Maris, Antimanuel d'économie. 2. Les cigales, chapitre "Économie et écologie ou comment «j'ai tué Maman»".