Poverty

The Year is 2020, So Where is the Vision?

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Humanity bumbling along, governing bodies staring longingly into their former selves à la Dorian Grey and his cloaked mirror, and so-called policies as ham-fisted as a fist full of, erm, ham. Yes, the list just rolls on and on in this the only year in history dedicated to a field of vision deemed as clear and perspicacious as you can get. Oh, the irony of it all! We might be languishing in the year of our landlord, 2020, but we as a race do not enjoy the accompanying 20/20 vision that makes a bleary-eyed rookie into a hawk-eyed fighter pilot.

Let’s start with the only thing that really matters, and no it’s not us. Dorian Grey’s older self would be disappointed to hear that admission. That thing I speak of is the world around us. Let’s face it, it’s the only world we’ll ever have and the only living one within about, let’s say for argument’s sake, ten light years, or 58 trillion 590 billion kilometres, if you’re claiming on mileage. Wilderness, as most of us are aware, is being co-opted for agronomy and industry to serve a human population that is beginning to resemble an infestation or worst still a bacterial culture gone rogue in a planet-sized petri dish. This is happening at a rate for which there is no excuse. We are eating ourselves out of house and home and the only ones not seeing that are those with their craw stuffed full of nature’s bounty, as well as unschooled ignoramuses, for which there are many even if the the doyens of political correctness admonish us for calling out all the provincial thinkers in our swelled ranks. We have known for much of my own lifetime about the concomitant risks in taming the wild places: what is lost cannot be recovered in a timeframe that humans understand. Every Tom, Dick and Harry, however hard of hearing, must know that extinction is forever. We’ve known the phrase slash and burn for decades and, encoded in it, all its barbaric implications. Even though the debate has taken on new and violent terms of reference, eco-vandalism is going on in spite of our knowledge of it and complicity in it. All the while it seems the more dire the prognostications, the more wanton our behaviour and the more debased our greed for the things that have kept the world hitherto in balance. I have lost track of the number of times I hear the term ‘sixth extinction’. Now if that were insufficient to jolt us into redefining the boundaries by which the human race exploits the natural world, i do not know therefore what is sufficient. The more the mainstream media reports on how we’re approaching a tipping point, a point of no return, the more the average family’s material needs appear to multiply. While global population ploughs upward to an 11-digit figure, our celebrity culture boasts of its procreative prowess by inviting the media to snapshot their opulent lives in rural Sussex with six children in tow. Why make the implicit link between many offspring and material success in the knowledge that this is a false correlation? I mean, throughout most of history large families have more often than not been synonymous with extreme poverty, and not opulence. A Prime Minister of Great Britain with six offspring (that we know of), chaired with the task of finding a common voice to bring down the human impact? Gimme a break. What kind of vision is that coming from the stuttering mouth of yet another high-flying free-market mercantilist libertarian who believes in the greatest markets for the greatest numbers?

While the correlation between modern industry and atmospheric-changing carbon emissions has been better made, we continue to miss the point. If you want to trace the problem back to its genesis, jump not onto the bandwagon of climate change. Look again, use that 20-20 vision and you’ll see that Attenborough has been whispering truth: it all comes back to global human population. It’s out of control and from it everything flows. Rampant human overpopulation is the taproot down which a pestilent tree of Man grows. Wild habitat is stolen to tend the needs of a burgeoning population (in Africa and Asia) who all aspire to live as postwar Americans have. Forest goes tree after tree, species after species. We know all this. We know that nothing hosts biodiversity better than a forest found 20 degrees either side of the equator. We know the secrets to finding cures for human ailments lies within their mind-blowing array of biota. We know that to have space to grow row after endless row of oil palm trees to produce better soap and all manner of packet food to feed ever-growing numbers of hungry mouths and to wash evermore grubby little faces, we first have to collapse an ecosystem perfectly evolved to provided a pyramidical shelter for every manner of creature, plant and fungus from here to kingdom come. We know that without canopy cover the thin, reedy soils of the tropics turn infertile, into dust under the blazing sun. So why do we, as a race, persist in laying the groundwork to seed our own miserable demise? Why clear-fell whole countries only to fatten cattle for their mass slaughter to give some Lazy Joe a nutrition-depleted, ready-made burger? Not content with turning the complex machinery of nature into a monocultural wasteland where even the public are forbidden to go, we’re even ramping up operations on livestock farms to expand the export market for meat into a China that’s seen the largest middle-class in history emerge within the past thirty years. Even their tastes are changing to embrace a completely cruel and unsustainable world. Bye bye Taoism. The only consolation we can draw is that 800 million Hindus refuse point blank to jump on the cattle train, not that Mother India is a shining beacon of environmental custodianship.

Living in 2020 without the corresponding vision is not totally unlike the proverbial overflowing bucket of liquified manure that spills out to all quarters. It’s not just the disappearance of tropical and sub-tropical forest, nor the disappearance of broadleaf temperate forest that we in Europe have mourned for a thousand years. It’s everything, everywhere. The human cancer has gone metastatic. Desert is growing everywhere between latitude 20 and 30 north and south, yet we turn a blind eye for most of us do not live in a desert, nor have so much as stepped in one. Grasslands have already been co-opted, but that’s old news now since Buffalo Bill Hickok shot six million bison on the Great Plains as a way of spitefully starving the Sioux. Ice is going, yet while we mourn its melting we overlook that if it were advancing – as it has dozens of times in the past two million years – we wouldn’t find it so brilliant white or cute. As for the oceans, well, not only have we gone from trawler to factory ship as if to underscore the intensification of the end for all who partake in the feast of misery, we continue to sully the waters around our coasts and then some more. We’ve created a floating mat of congealed plastics that swirl around in the North Pacific and is reckoned to be the size of big ol’ Texas. A remarkable feat of human ingenuity if you ask me. Only outdone by the crass stupidity of knowing that fish stocks (even the term ‘stocks’ implies monetary value and property for humans) are near exhausted, so how about we build trawlers the size of small passenger liners with hooked lines trailing off the stern, some long enough to reach the moon and back, which was in all fairness the last decent thing we ever did to get one over on nature. Scrape the seabed for a catch that justifies the distances the fleets (mainly Chinese) will go in order to bring home the ocean’s bacon. They know the damage wrought by this crude method, but do they care? They must know that hardwired into their rapacious business model is the reality that what they’re doing is finite and temporary and smacks of the kind of short-term strategic planning that is no planning at all. Rather, the dragnet of modern fishing fleets represents another instance of short-sightedness that can never equate to the far, crystal clear vision that 20-20 provides.

A discussion about the absence of vision in the year where the two words best eclipse, cannot be foreclosed without mention of political will and leadership. It does not require radical insight to see that leadership around the world is characterized by a near collapse in the manner of vision needed to see the living Earth through the 21st century without any more bodily desecration than is strictly needed to lead a low-impact life. Leaders are followers. Whom they follow is up for argument, but you can bet that the pursuit of profit and unenlightened self-interest lies right behind them. Britain and the U.S. are grotesque examples of nations who have known visionary leadership in their illustrious pasts and who have now descended into a near-existential breakdown because the current crop of leaders are singularly lacking in the kind of millennial vision that sees a hundred years ahead, and not the next hundred days, fearing the imminence of their own destruction, which is the lot of the modern politician. Where are the leaders that the world in crisis demands? Where are the new wave of articulate young voices? Where is the unity of purpose in it all? Of course, worshipping the making of capital and looking to those early 21st century capitalists as pedigree for the type of leadership our damaged world needs is going to end badly. The credo of unlimited economic growth built upon the conquest of nature (as espoused by Adam Smith back in 1776) is a dangerous one, setting a course for yet more planetary destruction by a species whose boots have gotten too big for their feet, whose eyes have grown too large and covetous for their sockets, but whose vision has dimmed. Contrary to the saucer-sized eyes they think is needed for a bigger, bolder vision, they’re missing the whole point: its smaller, less covetous eyes we need, but eyes that penetrate the darkness we currently find ourselves lost in.

Too Good To Be True

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That ol’ devil called greed is back again. Many feared the worst while others dreamed of a new, kinder dawn. But oh no no, sir! No sooner is full lockdown eased, untimely death is no longer news. And why? Because that she-devil, the economy, is back. No sooner has its mouth been welded shut than its teeth are glistening at the prospect of new blood.

Turn on the news and talk of rekindling a lost love for nature, or for that matter stopping to reflect on human suffering and the slow torture of social isolation, has been superseded by dire prognostications of poor industrial output, negative deficits, and looming recession. Figures in the billions (£) are banded around where only last week the figures were reserved for the dead. Yes, I’m afraid it’s time to rally together in a final push over the top to be mown down not by the bullets of the Bosch but by debt, overconsumption and more reckless environmental despoliation.

vikings

However, this national obsession with wealth accumulation has substantial precedent when seen over the arc of history. The very name Britannia came into being as a nomenclature given by Roman imperial planners (Britanicus, I think, was one of the Julio-Claudean line of rulers). The island was finally absorbed into the Romanosphere in the mid-first century not for magnanimous reasons but because it was known since Phoenician times for its lucrative silver, tin, lead and gold mines. Then, following the departing legions, Jutes, Angles and Saxons came not for magnanimous reasons but because in that fertile soil lay wealth and prosperity. Following them, the dreaded Danes, who arrived in the 790s on raiding parties along the North Sea coast. Not for magnanimous reasons did they emerge on the flat horizon, but to plunder the treasures known to be held in the abbeys. Following them the Normans, who didn’t raise a psychotic militia for magnanimous reasons but to spill blood onto land they knew would bring a crop of splendiferous wealth. During the civil war in the 1640s, a genuine attempt was made at levelling the appalling inequalities of serfdom in the late middle ages. But again that was snuffed out again by the forces of avarice. The Bank of England would be established forty years after the failures of English republicanism just to underscore the direction the country was heading in. In that century too, The East India Company and the Hudson Bay Company consolidated their royally-sanctioned gains to become the Multi-Nationals of their day. Following the failures of political equality in England, the notion of republicanism as the only force for egalitarianism was then left to France and the inchoate United States. In the years following the Seven Years War with France, by the mid-1700s the British empire had become the most profitable venture in the history of the world. Its adherence to the doctrine of greed, masqueraded as mercantilism, became set in stone, an article of faith.

Top-questions-answers-East-India-Company

And so it is that the country, as it appears today, finds itself true to its atavistic self. In other words, its socio-cultural DNA had been inherited from a long lineage. Other than the blip following both world wars when some kind of radical redistribution of wealth had to be sought to avoid a civilisational collapse, Britain has proven herself more adept at pursuing riches by any means possible than it has for coming up with novel ways of how people can co-exist harmoniously with each other and with the ecology that still clings to the land’s surface. It wasn’t for want of clever men and women that naked economics trumped high ideals. Those big ideas the so-called deep state (the power behind the power) encouraged our philosophers to debate, providing their conclusions arrived at a natural law of supply and demand, and of how man is shaped by self-evolving and universal economic forces than – as was the case in revolutionary France – how economic forces could be shaped by man and altered to reflect a fairer society. Utilitarianism, a dominant thought system in the very acquisitive nineteenth century was a excellent case in point. The greatest happiness for the greatest number lent itself well as a doctrine to England earning the sobriquet of a nation of shopkeepers.

Industrial Revolution

In the southern parts of this island, we are still wedded to the idea that economics of unlimited growth in a world bound by physical limits determines levels of happiness. No doubt it is better to be a rich man in a cold country than a poor man in a warm one. However, the great mechanisms of how we interact with tradable commodities continue to dominate thinking in informing the consensus. Lockdown was a chance to redress that imbalance. It was a unique opportunity for the average Joe to hop off the spinning wheel for a while and to try seeing life – and what he/she values from it – from a wholly different perspective. This perfect convergence of variables (that is to say, unusually great weather, government providing a blanket of financial support to the majority, as well as the stillness in the air that permitted us to think long and hard) gave the millions upon millions of conscripts fighting as footsoldiers and corporals in the boom and bust economic war the chance to think again about what they wanted out of their country. Unfortunately, like the Christmas Day short truce of 1914 where British and German soldiers showed their mutual enmity by getting together for a game of football and a post-match drink, this too is a false dawn. Like those men who knew, through a simple game of football, they had more in common with one another than with the chiefs of staff who sent them to the front in the first place, this cosy little interregnum that some have been enjoying of late is too dangerous to continue. The unfair society harnessed by the economics of naked aggression and unlimited growth cannot survive the neglect and contempt it is being shown at present.

1914-christmas-truce

The second age of the robber barons is not over yet. But a few more pandemic lockdowns might just do the trick. And not unlike the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, a spring clean of the people (i.e. a serious trimming of human numbers leading to a radical restructuring of the socioeconomic order) may just give the downtrodden a glimmer of hope. And a chance to rise up alongside a damned and damaged natural world from the scorched earth of a long and unfruitful economic obsession.