Nature's Evil [calibre 5.27.0]

Four justices

The COVID-19 pandemic has compelled many governments of the world to formulate programmes of action which entail reaching carbon neutrality, removing notorious subsidies from oil producers, subsidising renewable energy and assisting the sick and the underprivileged. But again because of the pandemic, most of these ideas remain on paper. In the USA, the name of the project that is waiting for realisation, the Green New Deal, alludes to the policy which brought relief from the Great Depression. That New Deal was also green – Roosevelt’s administration founded the Civilian Conservation Corps, which employed 250,000 people, and was also known as ‘Roosevelt’s Forest Army’. Between 1933 and 1942, the corps planted 3 billion trees, bringing an end to the dust storms in several states. 13 Hopefully, the New Green Deal will do even more. In Europe, the ambitious but underfinanced project of green recovery has been accepted under the pressure of COVID.

The green recovery subordinates economics to politics and politics to ecology. A new programme of recognition and redistribution , it is much more inclusive than the reconstruction and welfare programmes that we saw in the past. The American philosopher Nancy Fraser has developed the concepts of recognition and redistribution in her critical analysis of justice in contemporary societies. 14 In my view, these helpful concepts should be broadened to include not only human but also non-human agents. If various elements of nature, from insects to permafrost, are recognised as critically important for the continuation of life, then multiple resources – also extracted from nature but with the added value of human labour and knowledge – should be redistributed in their favour. This will include a partial decommodification of nature: many forests will be restored, livestock farms closed, and growth discontinued. Calculated in monetary terms, gross product is the measure of the commodification of nature and labour. If different natural resources have different political characteristics, then adding them all up with goods and services is pointless. As long as national governments continue to exist, their milestones will be the gigatons of carbon released into the atmosphere; and, if we are all to survive, countries will compete not for the growth of domestic product but for the reduction of national emissions. This would be the equivalent of implementing a ‘carbon standard’, with the carbon footprint replacing gold as the general equivalent. At the moment this sounds like a utopian idea, though from the economic perspective it is quite realistic; all the obstacles are political (see chapter 13 ).

It is hard to give up the idea of unlimited growth, but we have already had to renounce many of our cherished ideas – for example, progress: our mothers and grandfathers lived worse than us, our daughters and grandsons will live better, and this assumption accords with the emotional patterns of love and pride. But, in rich countries, the under-thirties are the first generation for centuries to be worse off than their parents or grandparents. Life will be even less comfortable in a world that will be 1 or 2 degrees warmer than it is today. Floods and fires will absorb trillions of dollars, which will damage the labour market still further. Pandemics and wars will reduce life expectancy and lead to mass migrations, which will cause a further deterioration in the political climate. Most probably, the routine blessings of a modest life – a house, a car, tourist travel, holidays in the countryside and, ultimately, ‘nature’ herself – will become luxuries.

Looking back at the last hundred years, we can see that class inequality has hardly changed in the modern world – even wars and revolutions reduced it only for a short while. Gender inequality has gradually diminished thanks to women’s entry into the full-time labour market, but great differences remain. The inequality between different countries reflects the variability of nature and history – global warming will only accentuate these differences. Inequality among different age cohorts is a relatively new topic for the social sciences – but not, of course, for the moral thinkers who have repeatedly called for fathers to do the best for their children. In our pre-apocalyptic world, the ideal of cohort equality is critically important. Can we prevent the sufferings of future generations by our efforts?

Society does not live outside nature, and economic life is not separate from its ecological consequences. Every act of individual consumption causes another release of carbon into the atmosphere which we all breathe – plants, animals, people. Ecological reforms depend on behavioural changes which will amount to a revolution, and they will be impossible without equally radical changes in international relations. Only a global community can avert catastrophe, and once again revolution can succeed only if it is worldwide. The New Deal worked in one individual country, but the Green New Deal will work only on a planet-wide scale. The scale of the impending catastrophe is tantamount to the establishment of global sovereignty: the terror will come not from Leviathan but from Gaia.

If he happened to turn up in our too sunny world, Candide would recognise familiar themes. The pandemic would not surprise him – he had heard of plagues that were even more horrible. He would rejoice for Pangloss, who would be cured of his venereal disease, and would be amazed by all the gadgets in our technological Eldorado. But he would be still more astonished to hear taxi drivers banging on about prices and oligarchs, traffic jams and wildfires. He would think how simple and comprehensible the Lisbon earthquake was. It killed people but didn’t discredit humanity. Victims were counted in thousands, but there were no perpetrators. Man-made horror is a different thing altogether: it humiliates and devalues. There’s nothing worse than feeling guilty, Candide would think, observing the mess we have made of our world. For centuries people have been inflicting suffering on one another, all the while repeating sermons about goodness and peace. The reasons were and are the same – the greed of some and the stupidity of others. Greed and stupidity eat away at the foundations of solidarity which nature instilled in us. Because of them, humankind grows on nature’s beautiful body like a malignant tumour, gobbling up some of her juices and poisoning others.

‘Excellently observed,’ Candide would say; ‘but let us cultivate our garden.’ 15

Note

Notes

1   Bonneuil and Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene . 2   Smil, Energy Transitions ; Smil, Making the Modern World . 3   Lovelock, Gaia . 4   Latour, Facing Gaia . 5   Nordhaus, ‘Reflections on the economics of climate change’; Beck, The Metamorphosis of the World . 6   Osokina, Zoloto dlya industrializatsii . 7   Mokyr, The Lever of Riches ; Zaretsky, Secrets of the Soul . 8   Kuznets, Toward a Theory of Economic Growth . 9   Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism . 10  Bonneuil and Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene . 11  Latour, ‘Europe as a refuge’. 12  Agamben, The Time that Remains . 13  Deaton, ‘How FDR fought climate change’. 14  Fraser, ‘From redistribution to recognition?’; Fraser, ‘Behind Marx’s hidden abode’. 15  Voltaire, Candide , p. 97.