Our planet’s sustainability at stake

Arun Maira

Former Member, Planning Commission

IN its recent verdict in the case of the Great Indian Bustard, the Supreme Court has recognised the fundamental right of humans to be free from the adverse impact of climate change. The ruling has dismayed policymakers and builders of renewable energy infrastructure. They say the judges are setting aside the advice of scientific experts and delaying the construction of infrastructure for reversing climate change. The court admits that climate change has brought jurisprudence into unchartered territory. Solutions cannot be found with the same way of thinking that has caused the problem. The existential problem caused by climate change cannot be understood and solved by the prevalent paradigms of capitalist economics and unsystemic science.

Citizens with diverse needs must listen to each other to come to a consensus about the type of society they want to create for themselves.

In capitalist economies, natural capital is the property of its owner. Kings and landlords owned the land, water and forests, and all the fish and animals within their private estates. They also owned the produce of all humans who lived and worked on their land as their serfs or slaves. Owners who stayed on their land and interacted with the people on it could see their forests and watch their crops grow, and their workers sweat, and sense how the system worked. Absentee landlords did not care. They wanted their profits regardless of the damage to their land by droughts and floods, besides the sufferings of their workers.

The development of commodity markets, in which animals, farm produce, timber and minerals could be bought and sold with money and prices determined by traders, converted natural capital into financial capital. Financial markets created a new class of capitalists, even further removed from reality than absentee landlords, who gauge the condition of the world from charts of how prices move in commodity exchanges and stock markets. When labour went off the land into factories, workers were paid for the time they spent in factories and what they produced during that time. Their skills and labour became commodities purchasable for a price by owners of enterprises.

Property rights are an ancient principle of economics and jurisprudence. Human rights were recognised much later with political movements, often violent, to abolish slavery, and to pay fair wages and provide safe working conditions for workers. Gig work is the 21st-century way to convert labour into a commodity again: workers on demand, payment only for the work done, and no social security — good for business owners, but bad for the people.

Garrett Hardin’s theory of the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ underlies the ideology of privatisation. The theory is that property which belongs to everybody is cared for by nobody. Therefore, the commons must be parcelled out to private owners to manage their own pieces efficiently, motivated by a drive to make more profit for themselves. Damage to the global environment, which belongs to everybody, has become a global-scale tragedy of the commons. It cannot be solved by further privatisation of property. A new theory of governance is required to obtain the ‘Promise of the Global Commons’.

Francis Bacon boasted at the birth of the European Enlightenment in the 17th century that science would give humans the power to control unruly nature. Scientific discoveries in physics, chemistry and biology have produced powerful tools for exploiting the earth to improve humanity’s material wellbeing, and technologically advanced nations are envied for the material wellbeing of their citizens. Overexploitation has harmed the health of the earth. Thus, with technological hubris, humans have destroyed the sustainability of the planet and harmony among people.

Modern science has broken the complexity of systems into small components. Separate sciences are advanced by experts who know more and more about less and less. They are like the blind men around the proverbial elephant. None sees the whole reality. Modern medicine has developed marvellous drugs and surgeries to repair various organs of the body. The side effects of the treatment of a diseased organ make the patients’ condition worse by harming other organs. Better health requires more generalists who understand the person’s body and mind.

Economics broke away from other social sciences in the last century, with all going into their specialised silos. Economics focused on the productivity of natural and human resources to increase the GDP. Economists know how to increase the material size of an economy, but not how to improve equity in the economy and sustainability of natural resources, along with growth.

Economists, like other scientists, look for causal relationships among various forces within a system, presuming all are unidirectional. The modern scientific approach cannot understand forces that mutually arise and have circular relationships of cause and effect with each other. Economists who advocate for higher GDP first to grow more resources to improve the HDI (human development index) and later for environmental sustainability fail to see that human development and sustainable natural resources are prerequisites for economic growth and will always be its foundations.

Humans are part of nature’s complex system, along with the soil, water systems and diverse species of plants, animals and insects. The wellbeing of all must be protected for sustainable development. Conservationists who focus on only one part of the system and advocate for more trees, or for the protection of one species like the tiger, are not taking a systemic view of the whole system. And those who want poor people to be cleared out of the commons to protect forests and tigers fail to see that humans are also an integral part of the system. Such scientific solutions for sustainability can be inhumane.

Complex systems can be understood only by listening to multiple points of view. The rule of law and speedy justice make countries attractive for financial investors and citizens. However, investors and citizens have different needs, and therefore different interpretations of law. Good governance and justice for all require those who govern to continuously listen to the people. Courts and experts within their narrow specialisations cannot create a consensus among citizens. Citizens with diverse needs must listen to each other to come to a consensus about the type of society they want to create for themselves. 

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#Climate change #Environment #Supreme Court