Depletion of resources as income 

I have been involved in a recent set of discussions about the economy and its relationship to the ecology of the earth.  Some of the participants in the discussion believe that everything is fine, poverty is going down, incomes are up.  I have been arguing that the rise in income that we see in many parts of the world is the destruction of natural capital that humans claim is income rather than depletion of resources.  China has seen a rapid rise in incomes and drop in poverty, but at the price of massive pollution, the loss of farmland, major floods, deforestation, and an incredible surge in Greenhouse gas production, all of which are starting to rapidly impinge on its economic growth.

Related to this, within the Green Party there is discussion about how the control of the monetary system by the Federal Reserve Bank and the fact that we grow the money supply by borrowing money are the key culprits in all of the economic woes that we see in our community and on our planet. 

I am participating in the discussion, here and elsewhere by pointing out that part of the need to keep inflating the economy is because so often the depletion of natural capital is considered income.  As resources deplete the prices go up unless people find a new source for the resource at a cheap price.  This sort of worked for the last few hundred years, but what is so different now is that in the last 15 years or so humans have started to use more than 100% of the annual natural productivity of the planet, going from 85% of the natural productivity of the planet feeding humans in 1987 to approximately 120% of the annual productivity being used in 2005.  The result is faster depletion of capital, hence the need to run the dance faster.

In any case we come up with the same conclusion. Corporate growth based economies require massive violence to subjugate the people so the corporatists can continue their exploitation, but eventually even that is not going to work as there will be no new place on the planet to exploit and provide the natural resources underpinning the while thing. 

One resource that really is an excellent indicator of this is forests.  Wood is so essential for modern industrialism that one could almost look at the corporatist expansion of the last 500 years as a continuous effort to find new sources of wood.  The last previously unexploited, or rather unexploited by global corporatism, natural forests of the planet ended up to be the tropical forests of Amazonia and Indonesia.  Indonesia’s forest are due to be all incorporated into the corporate global market within 15 years.  Brazil’s may last a bit longer.

It is also quite interesting that the final frontier forests of the world are falling to the chain saw at the same time as we have finally come to understand peak oil.  I do not think it is a coincidence.

Greg Gerritt Providence RI 4/7/07

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