Sustainability!

David Bamber, in his essay on sustainability elsewhere on this site, paints a rather disspiriting picture of the universe. He makes out that we might as well exploit our planet to our hearts' content, since we're all going to end up dead anyway. It's an interesting perspective, but I can't help thinking that it ignores an important aspect of our relationship with God.

Genesis 1:26 makes it clear that God gave us dominion over the earth and all that is in it; the NIV translates this as "rule over", which conveys the same basic idea. Note, however, that man is not the ultimate ruler of the planet. He is accountable to God for his actions, and - like anyone who is appointed to a position of authority - he is supposed to act responsibly. God has, in effect, appointed mankind to the role of steward. It is our job to look after His world, to rule over it but not to own it. After all, "The earth is the LORD's, and the fulness thereof" - Psalm 24:1.

It is of course perfectly true that the planet won't last forever - but that doesn't mean we shouldn't look after it whilst we have it. After all, we know that cars will rust into oblivion one day, and yet a great many people still wash them. We know that the weight of millennia will obliterate our gardens, and yet we still plant flowers in the spring, and we still mow the lawn. Our babies will be dead in a hundred years from now, and yet we still feed them. The fact that we are mortal should not blind us to the fact that we are alive! Nor should it allow us to think that we can ignore the needs of our descendants.

But once we have decided that we should aim for a sustainable economy, the question arises of how we can do this. And the question is urgent.

The urgency stems from the fact that our economy is based on completely the wrong model for sustainability. We measure success in terms of growth, and we measure growth in terms of how much more profit we made this year than we did last year.

This sounds reasonable at first, but when you think about it for even a moment, it becomes clear that such a model is doomed to catastrophic failure. Consider, as a simple example, Silliname Generic Fishermen Ltd, a firm that catches and sells fish. To keep things very simple indeed, we'll assume that the price of fish is £10 per kilogram (about a fiver a pound, or ten thousand pounds a ton), in "real terms". We will also ignore quotas, since most industries don't actually have them. By the end of the first year (say 2000, to keep the figures nice and round), our heroes have caught a hundred tons of fish, giving them a gross income of a cool million, less expenses. Their net profit (!) is, say, fifty thousand pounds. The firm is pleased, but is determined to grow by 10% each year. Let's watch what happens in this (admittedly over-simplistic) model.

At the end of 2001, SGF's accountants tell them that they've netted £55000, which is in line with their hopes. To do this, they've boosted production by catching an extra ten tons of fish over the previous year. The increased costs associated with this extra catch account for the rest of the increase in turnover.

SGF continues to flourish, and meets its growth targets year on year. By 2008, they're doing very nicely - they've doubled their profit! It's now over £107,000, which is most gratifying. By 2015, they've quadrupled to £200,000+, and by 2022 it's more than £400,000.

By 2030 their profit has doubled again, and we're beginning to see a pattern. Roughly every eight years, the profit doubles. By 2100, the great-grandsons of the original company's owners are profiting to the tune of £689,000,000 a year! To generate this income, they are catching around 1.38 million tons of fish, which is around 2% or so of the world market. So they're doing very well.

You'd think that, after another hundred years, the great-great-great-great-grandsons of the original owners would be doing much, much better. According to the figures, they would own the biggest fishery company in the world, with an annual profit of £9,500,000,000,000! That's almost ten English billions, but you probably aren't familiar with those, since most media use American billions in their reporting nowadays. Using American units, this is ten trillion pounds - in real terms!

But there's a problem, as I'm sure you already guessed.

Take a look at the catch. Just shy of 19,000,000,000 tons. The annual production of fish biomass on Earth is approximately 240,000,000 tons. And so our pipedream falls apart, way before we get to the year 2200. In fact, as early as 2155, the company are taking more fish out of the ocean each year than it can replenish within that year. From that point on, it's just a matter of a short time before the fish are completely gone.

That's where a growth economy gets you. And fish are, at least for the time being, a renewable resource! How do you think non-renewable resources will stand up to such treatment? The answer, of course, is that they don't. They can't. When we've used up all the oil, that'll be the end of the oil. We won't be able to say "oh, let's shove the last few barrels in a reservation and see if we can't get them to reproduce" because oil doesn't work like that. When it's gone, it's gone. And we'll be saying to ourselves "why on earth did we burn it, instead of using it to make plastics?"

Companies don't just seek growth via increased turnover. They also increase profits by reducing costs. By far the biggest expense for many companies is that of wages. So there's an easy win here; either automate, or - if you can't automate - at least outsource the work to countries where the labour markets are more flexible (i.e. are prepared to work in sweatshop conditions for a sweatshop wage).

Either way, the result for our country will be high unemployment.

Now, unemployment isn't necessarily a bad thing. If we were able to arrange matters so that none of us had to work (because all the farming and housework and so on was done for us by machines, say) unless we really wanted to, wouldn't that be something? You could browse the Net to your heart's content. Joe could play golf till the cows came home, my wife could make dozens of quilts, and I could scribble out as many articles on computer programming as I can think up. But that only works if we are able to afford to eat, drink, clothe and shelter ourselves, and pursue the activities we enjoy. That may sound like an unattainable Paradise, but it's not, really. The whole point of automating dull, repetitive tasks is to free human beings from the necessity of having to perform those tasks. That doesn't mean - or shouldn't mean - that those human beings are now surplus to requirements!

A growth economy is ultimately unsustainable, but a steady state economy is not. And a steady state economy is not the same thing as a stagnant economy, any more than a car travelling at a steady 70mph is stationary. We are already using the Earth's resources at too fast a rate, and we need to slow right down, urgently. If we continue on this ludicrous course where we don't just experience, but actively seek, exponential growth, then David Bamber needn't worry about the heat death of the universe - the end of humanity will come much, much sooner than that.

If we want to have any kind of long-term survival hopes, there are several things we must do urgently:

• stop burning fossil fuels as soon as possible; they will serve us far more effectively as plastics than as CO₂;
• convert as many vehicles as possible to be powered by renewable fuel resources (because if we don't, it'll be back to horse and cart rather earlier than might otherwise be necessary);
• stop all non-emergency aircraft flights, NOW, worldwide;
• invest in re-establishing shipbuilding and ship repair yards;
• introduce redundancy pensions (payments made by a firm to an ex-employee who had been made redundant, paid weekly or monthly until retirement, even if he or she secures another job); this will discourage companies from making people redundant, and will allow people to live above the poverty line even when their skills are no longer required;
• stop building on greenfield sites, completely and permanently;
• start breeding horses again, and invest in decent stabling. And hay, of course.

This isn't a "let's get back to nature" idyll. This is about the only realistic chance we've got of surviving the transition from an oil-based economy to an oil-starved economy. And it's far from being a complete list of the things we must do to survive. But it's a start, and it's a start we have little choice but to make, if we wish to make the move from a suicidally reckless growth economy to a sane, viable, and sustainable steady state economy.

If we do manage to achieve this, the payoff - over and above mere survival - is that we'll be able to slow down a little and smell the roses occasionally. And more to the point, we'll be learning once more to use God's resources wisely. With good stewardship, we can at last begin to address the problems of poverty, not just in this country but all over the world.