Humbling Ourselves

A TINY, MICROSCOPIC ORGANISM, not even alive, is bringing the mighty American economy to its knees, bringing humanity to its knees, humbling us. Nature inevitably finds ways to remind us to be humble, respectful of its omniscience. We are a small species of animal life so arrogant with our meager powers of comprehension that we choose to believe that we look like God,so we invent a God who looks like us. We wantonly exploit and destroy our natural environment to satisfy our greed and vanity, we build huge monuments to ourselves, and nature takes note,brings us to our knees. There should be seven trillion trees on this planet. There used to be. Now there are half that, and dwindling, and unless we hastily replace at least one trillion of them, we may or may not live to regret it. Soon there will be more tons of plastic in the ocean than fish. At the current rate of human population growth, in a few hundred years, the universe will be filled to capacity with human flesh. Population growth compounds exponentially, the resources necessary to sustain the growth can increase only arithmetically, as Thomas Malthus taught us two hundred years ago. So far, through modern agricultural techniques, we have kept pace, but barely, by the skin of our teeth, and we will soon begin to loose ground. The amount of human made material wealth in the world has increased by ten fold since 1960. We all want to get rich, to live in big, beautiful houses with manicured, barren, green, high maintenance lawns, we want to fill our pretty houses with pretty things, sacraments of pride, greed and vanity, only because we want to show our wealth to others, mistaking it for success. We do not increase everyone's standard of living reasonably, we do not lift people out of poverty. Instead we increase it madly, insanely, exorbitantly, for the privileged few, at the expense of the many, and of teh natural environment. john Maynard Keynes, arguably the greatest economist of the twentieth century, simply asked: "How much is enough?" By thsi he meant, at what point does the gospel of wealth, the gospel of free market growth finally produce enough material wealth to satisfy our gluttony? He never provided a definite answer, nor received one, but the question remains, because he, and all other economists, realize that there must come a time when we have enough. Free market capitalism depends upon growth, growth in population and in material production, for its survival. it cannot survival forever, nor for that matter, much longer. Traditionally, economic models have been depicted in linear form; the line moving from left to right on the graph, with the expectation of its moving up. Kate Raworth, an oxford economist and something of a renegade, in a seminal new book "Donut Economics", argues that the traditional linear paradigm ignores the realities of economic inseparability from social circumstances, and environmental factors. A more accurate depiction, she asserts, is the shape of a donut, in which, whenever individual needs are in balance with societal and environmental needs, the economy stays between the two concentric circles, and neither descends into the hole, nor travels outside the two rings. this model is gaining increasing attention as the unsustainability of all current economic systems becomes glaringly obvious. the sooner we all take heed, the better our chances of long term economic, and natural survival.