By Arthur Noll
Hello everyone. My name is Arthur Noll. Timothy Wilken invited me to join him here as a contributing editor. We have been corresponding the last couple of months or so, and finding a lot of agreement on fundamental ideas.
The background I bring is a formal education in mechanical engineering, some time spent in conventional industry, some time with wind energy, time spent as a carpenter and house fixer, and time spent in rural areas, on farms, struggling with environmental issues, sustainable food production, figuring how people can live in harmony with nature and each other. I’ve also struggled a lot with my personal health, it has taught me a lot about the importance of efficiency and being strong. It taught me not to take things for granted.
I started thinking about problems bigger than myself more than twenty years ago, reading E.F. Schumacher’s book, “Small is Beautiful”. If you haven’t read it, the central premise of that book, was that people acted as though the “problems of production”, the way we got basics like food, water, clothes and shelter, had been solved. He was an economist with personal experience with coal mines being worked out, when he looked at the finite supply of fossil fuel and all that it supported, he realized that we didn’t really know how to live in a sustainable way. I’ve taken that as the premise for what I’ve worked on in the last twenty years, that we don’t know, right down at the base of things, how to live. Nothing I’ve learned since then, has made me change my mind about this premise, though I’ve had to change my mind about many other things as I got closer to the reality of things. I had to quit being a vegetarian, for one example. And reduce my expectations of renewable energy sources. Yet I did find things that worked with unexpected ease and beauty. Like living in a canvas yurt, herding goats, gathering wild vegetables, tending trees, and many other things. I’ve indulged my talents as a mechanical design engineer and come up with some modifications on old ideas, that seem to work better.
Most importantly, I’ve made observations about human nature, and human needs and social structure, to solve the problem of the premise that we don’t know how to live sustainably with nature and each other. Basically, I think instincts formed in the stone age, prevent most of us from acting rationally with regard to sustainability, and how we treat each other. Technology that enables us to take more from nature than can be sustained over generations, is judged to be an unqualified good thing by most people. Long term awareness of problems doesn’t compete with their short term drives. If a cow gets into a grain bin, they literally eat themselves to death. Technologists have claimed over and over that their inventions have overturned the balance of nature. When we discovered hard, tough metals, we found the key to the “grain bin”, and have been gorging without restraint ever since. The world was a large grain bin, and it has taken about three thousand years to get to this point, where the stomach ache is getting severe.
I am moved to say something about business. I occasionally hear people say that they are not anti business, but only against what businesses often do. I agree that the actions are often abhorrent. The trouble I see, is that businesses act as they do in response to forces that are inherent in the system that they operate in. So I have to be against capitalism, against markets, if I have seen these webs of cause and effect properly. Let me outline the major problems I see.
The fundamental rule of markets, is that they value abundant things as cheap. This causes all sorts of trouble, because it is an inherent incentive to ignore conservation of resources. If it is cheap, you use it. You don’t worry much about waste and sustainability. Economic models assume that as resources are used, prices will go up, and cause conservation, but the factors seldom work as smoothly as that. Resources can be so abundant that prices don’t rise in response to shortages, until several generations of people have increased population on them. Then you may well be trapped with unsustainable numbers of people. I think this is how we find ourselves right now.
Another problem is that it is an observable fact that people are interdependent. Yet using money makes people into independent agents, everyone is doing their own thing to the highest degree possible. Anyone who has played the game Monopoly, knows that someone “wins”, they end up owning everything. Real life markets are not much different. A few people “own” nearly everything, the rest are collecting a paycheck as they go around the board, and do well to stay even as they go around. This way of playing at independence from everyone else, exacerbates the market forces that label things as either cheap, or expensive. If you are bringing in a resource that is considered cheap, you have to bring in lots and lots of it, in order to make a living. This will definitely ignore the balance of nature. Something considered highly desirable, may bring a high price, which doesn’t protect it, people find it worth the time and energy to go out and hunt down a scarce but desired resource. Abundant people are considered cheap, even though we are clearly interdependent with each other, and no one who contributes in a positive manner can really be considered cheap, expendable.
Abundant people who act to exploit nature in unsustainable ways, will be treated as expendable by nature, however.
Garrett Hardin wrote about the “Tragedy of the Commons”, where people acting in their own interest, as independent agents, will destroy resources held in common. It is felt that ownership of land, of resources, will prevent this problem, but it doesn’t. If your neighbor is exploiting the resources of his land, and sells cheaper than you, it doesn’t matter if his practices are not sustainable over the long term. Over the short term, if you don’t match his production, meet his prices, you will lose your piece of land.
Over the short term, markets reward those who exploit nature and other people. Over the long term, exploitation fails to compete, it runs out of energy. Nature always swings the balance back in the end.
There is a lot more I could say, but I won’t try to say it all right now. Most of the arguments are in my book, available on the web at: https://synearth.net/trust-2015/Harmony.html
I know all this is quite radical, but I hope we can discuss these ideas and what to do about them.
In the spirit of truth and harmony,
Arthur Noll