The Age of Global Warming: A History (9 page)

6

Spaceship Earth

We came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.

Bill Anders on Apollo 8, 24
th
December 1968

On 23rd March 1964, the first session of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) was held in Geneva. Four thousand delegates from one hundred and nineteen countries attended, making it the largest international event held up to that date. The United Nations had designated the 1960s the Decade of Development and the creation of UNCTAD reflected the growing weight of Third World countries in the UN General Assembly. In the 1950s, Latin America had twenty out of the fifty-one seats in the General Assembly. Decolonisation meant that in the 1960s, the Third World constituted the majority. The Geneva conference saw the formalisation of the G77 group as the largest voting bloc in the UN.

Only two speakers were given a standing ovation, the improbably pinstriped Che Guevara and the secretary-general of the conference, Raúl Prebisch. Like Guevara, Prebisch was an Argentine exile. Although the CIA had kept him under surveillance in the 1950s, Prebisch was no revolutionary. Born in 1901, he had a meteoric rise. Appointed under-secretary of finance at the age of twenty-nine, he quickly rose to become general manager of Argentina’s central bank.

On the outbreak of the Second World War, realising it would lead to American economic leadership, Prebisch went to Washington to negotiate a trade deal. A three-minute courtesy call with Franklin Roosevelt turned into an hour-long meeting. Roosevelt urged Prebisch to nationalise Argentina’s British-owned railways, at the same time warning him that railways were a poor investment.
[1]

Following a coup in 1943, Prebisch was sacked. There was no place for him in the new regime, so he decided to develop the economic policies Argentina should adopt after the war. Prebisch believed that Argentina’s reliance on agriculture condemned it to boom-bust cycles and decline relative to the industrialised world. At the centre of his economic thinking was a structural rift between the core and the periphery of the international trading system. Trends in commodity prices relative to prices of manufactured goods between 1873 and 1938 provided evidence, Prebisch argued, that the commodity-producing periphery was at a structural disadvantage to the industrialised core. 

A UN conference at Havana in 1949 set the stage for Prebisch’s new ideas. Tensions between the US and Latin America had been rising, fuelled by resentment of the US. Prebisch’s speech electrified the conference. ‘I gave consistency to ideas that were in the air. I did not create
ex novo
: I reflected an intellectual reality,’ he explained towards the end of his life.
[2]
Prebisch’s Havana Manifesto demonstrated why Third World countries were condemned to relative decline and provided their governments with policies that overturned the traditional ones prescribed by classical economics, just as Keynes had for economies during the Depression of the 1930s. ‘One of the conspicuous deficiencies of general economic theory from the point of view of the periphery,’ Prebisch told the conference, ‘is its false sense of universality.’
[3]

Exhilarated by the instant acclaim and attention, Prebisch suddenly disappeared. According to his biographer, ‘His sensational public success had unleashed an unbridled sexuality heretofore contained by a life of disciplined work and family.’
[4]
Three weeks later, he re-emerged to be acknowledged as the intellectual leader of a new path for the economic development of the Third World, one which emphasised the need for governments to actively stimulate industrialisation.

The path of economic development advocated by Prebisch ran in diametrically the opposite direction to the demands of the environmental movement in the West unleashed by
Silent Spring
. Thus two new forces were emerging to re-shape the post-war world. Their inner logic was antithetical to each other. Unless they could identify a common foe or develop a new synthesis, only one of them could prevail.

One aspect of Prebisch’s economic analysis meshed with the growing environmentalist movement in the West in the 1960s. Both were based on an assumption that markets failed. For Western environmentalists, markets led to environmental degradation and resource depletion. For Prebisch and his followers in the Third World, the benefits from trade between the core and the periphery – North and South as it would become in the UN development debates of the 1970s and 1980s – were distributed unequally. 

But in other ways, the two clashed. Environmentalists blamed the ills of society and threats to the environment on industrialisation. Prebisch argued that Third World governments should intervene to accelerate industrialisation. Western environmentalists believed resources were running out, implying higher commodity prices. Prebisch argued that prices of commodities would fall relative to prices of manufactured goods. Who was right? A 1992 study of twenty-six individual commodity prices over the period 1900–1983 suggests neither of them were. Of the twenty-six, sixteen were trendless, five had statistically significant negative trends and the remaining had positive trends.
[5]

Whatever its objective merits as an economic blueprint for developing countries, the Havana Manifesto was a political fact, one institutionalised with the creation of UNCTAD and the formation of the G77. In forming the most numerous voting bloc in the UN General Assembly, the Third World had succeeded in carving out a bargaining position in international negotiations wherever their agreement was required. Whenever it could, the G77 would insist that international issues be addressed through the General Assembly.

Environmentalists in the West were slow to recognise the dilemma this posed for environmentalism. During the 1960s, environmentalism went global – its mission became planetary. In July 1965, five days before a fatal heart attack, Adlai Stevenson, America’s ambassador to the UN, spoke of humanity as passengers on a little spaceship dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil. 

We cannot maintain it half fortunate, half miserable, half confident, half despairing, half slave – to the ancient enemies of man – half free in a liberation of resources undreamed of until this day. No craft, no crew can travel safely with such vast contradictions. On their resolution depends the survival of us all.
[6]

The following year, economist Kenneth Boulding picked up Stevenson’s theme. Entitled ‘The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth’, Boulding argued that past civilisations had imagined themselves to be living on an illimitable plane. ‘There was almost always somewhere beyond the known limits of human habitation, and over a very large part of the time man has been on earth, there has been something like a frontier.’
[7]
This was the ‘cowboy economy’, symbolising ‘the reckless, exploitative, romantic, and violent behaviour, which is characteristic of open societies’.
[8]
In the cowboy economy, consumption was regarded as a good thing, as was production. Now mankind was transitioning to the spaceman economy. Man’s material wellbeing would be constrained by the economics of the closed sphere. Everyone in the world shared the same spaceship. On spaceships, supplies are rationed; ‘The less consumption we can maintain a given state with, the better off we are.’
[9]

The metaphor of the spaceship economy carried a strong presumption in favour of global governance. What anyone did anywhere was the concern of everyone, everywhere.

Stevenson’s speech had been drafted by Barbara Ward, a British intellectual who, alongside Rachel Carson, has a strong claim to be the most consequential environmentalist of the twentieth century. In 1966, Ward gave a lecture,
Space Ship Earth
, in which she argued that mankind’s survival depended on developing a government of the world.

The longevity of China’s government, Mao being the latest dynasty, demonstrated that world government was possible. If two thousand years of rule can work for twenty-five per cent of the world’s population, ‘we can hardly argue that the task of government becomes
a priori
impossible simply because the remaining three-quarters are added’, Ward argued.
[10]
  Would a world government have to be authoritarian, she asked? No, look at the continental federation of the United States. ‘If a free continent is possible, why not an association of free continents?’
[11]

The expansion of environmentalism to embrace the future of the planet had huge implications for global politics and environmentalism. Whereas socialism within one country was a viable political doctrine, one-country environmentalism would be nothing more than symbolism. Saving the planet demanded global policies.

On Christmas Eve 1968, nearly a quarter of a million miles from Earth, the three crew members of Apollo 8 orbited the moon. Each took turns to read the first ten verses of the book of Genesis, ending their reading with ‘God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth’. The photographs were even more arresting; the first of the whole Earth, a blue disc suspended in a black void, and of the Earth rising above the curve of the moon’s horizon, an unforgettable contrast between the only known planet that supported life and the grey, pitted emptiness of the lunar landscape. Environmentalism had acquired as its icon one of the most powerful images ever produced.

Back on Spaceship Earth, a growing number of the crew were gaining their independence from declining imperial powers. The newly independent states had little interest in replacing an antiquated form of imperialism with a newer version and were adopting economic policies that ran counter to the anti-industrialisation tenets of Western environmentalism. How could the irreconcilable be reconciled? 

One man above all developed and popularised the notion that the solution to the environmental and spiritual crisis in the First World could be found in the Third World. Hailed by Jonathon Porritt, a leading British environmentalist and adviser to Prince Charles, as ‘the first of the “holistic thinkers” of the modern Green Movement’, Fritz Schumacher was born in Bremen three years before the First World War.
[12]
Revulsion at the Nazis led Schumacher to flee Germany and settle in Britain. He quickly developed a reputation as an able economist, engaging Keynes in discussions about post-war currency reform and working on the 1944 Beveridge Report on full employment.

His input into the Beveridge Report impressed Hugh Gaitskell. When he became minister of fuel and power in the 1945 Labour government, Gaitskell suggested that the newly nationalised National Coal Board appoint Schumacher as its chief economist. Like Jevons before him, Schumacher became alarmed at the prospect of resource depletion, ironically just as post-war demand for coal started to fall. In a 1954 lecture, Schumacher articulated his concern by placing the depletion of finite energy resources in the context of man’s relationship with nature.

We are living off capital in the most fundamental meaning of the word. Mankind has existed for many thousands of years and has always lived off income. Only in the last hundred years has man forcibly broken into nature’s larder and is now emptying it out at a breathtaking speed which increases from year to year … The whole problem of nature’s larder, that is the exhaustion of non-renewable resources, can probably be reduced to this one point – Energy.
[13]

Schumacher’s work at the Coal Board went hand in hand with a growing preoccupation with organic farming. He bought a house in Surrey with a four-acre garden, promptly joined the Soil Association and became an avid reader of its journal
Mother Earth
, edited by the former fascist Jorian Jenks. He invited an expert from the Soil Association to give a lecture to the Coal Board’s gardening club. ‘To listen to a lecture on food production in the Headquarters of fuel production,’ was, Schumacher told his colleagues, ‘the most significant concentration on the essential that I could imagine.’
[14]
He also developed an interest in Eastern mysticism and astrology, working out his children’s horoscopes. If used ‘correctly and wisely’, astrology could be a useful instrument in understanding one’s fellow men, Schumacher claimed.
[15]

The event that pulled these diffuse strands together was an invitation to be an economic adviser to the government of Burma. The trip was the final stage in Schumacher’s transformation. He left for Burma as an economist and returned as a soothsayer and guru. The Economic and Social Council of Burma, which had invited him, was not thrilled with its economic adviser seeking answers to economic questions from orange-robed monks. 

Stopping off in New York, ‘this American madhouse’, the contrast with Burma led him to declare that he had found the cure for Western civilisation – Buddhist economics.
[16]
A Buddhist approach would distinguish between misery, sufficiency and surfeit. ‘Economic “progress” is good only to the point of sufficiency, beyond that, it is evil, destructive, uneconomic,’ Schumacher said.
[17]
Economics was based on materialism and the religions of the East offered an alternative, the new guru thought.  Mahatma Gandhi had laid down the foundation for a system of economics that, Schumacher believed, would be compatible with Hinduism and Buddhism too. 

‘Buddhist economics’ enabled Schumacher to recast the narrower depletionist arguments developed by Jevons ninety years before into a new language mixing ecologism and Eastern mysticism:

A Buddhist economy would make the distinction between ‘renewable’ and ‘non-renewable resources’. A civilisation built on renewable resources, such as products of forestry and agriculture, is by this fact alone superior to one built on non-renewable resources … The former co-operates with nature, while the latter robs nature. The former bears the sign of life, while the latter bears the sign of death.
[18]

All this was poured into Schumacher’s classic,
Small is Beautiful
. It gave him a huge cult following. The one thing it wasn’t was what Schumacher claimed it to be: ‘A study of economics as if people mattered.’ Answering critics who asked what economics had to do with Buddhism, Schumacher replied. ‘Economics without spirituality can give you temporary and physical gratification, but it cannot provide an internal fulfilment.’
[19]
Economics without Buddhism is like sex without love. The remark illustrates Schumacher’s flawed premise. Economics is not a science of happiness. Economic welfare is only a part of human welfare; it has no claims to explain what falls outside its domain or resolve the problems of the spirit, ethical problems or indeed instruct people on how to find happiness.

Instead
Small is Beautiful
is a collection of
pensées
and injunctions, predominantly of a religious and philosophical character – many of them trite, trivial or bizarre. Why is small beautiful? ‘Man is small, and, therefore, small is beautiful,’ said the Sage of Surrey.
[20]
Technology must therefore be redirected to the actual size of man. Buddhist economics means simplicity and non-violence.
[21]
What might this mean in practice?  ‘It would be highly uneconomic, for instance, to go in for complicated tailoring, like the modern west, when a much more beautiful effect can be achieved by the skilful draping of uncut material,’ Schumacher opined.
[22]
  

What has this to do with economics? As Humpty Dumpty explained to Alice, ‘When I use a word, it means what I choose it to mean’ – an attitude that is the mark of a guru, not a philosopher or economist.

Schumacher liked trees. If people followed the Buddhist injunction to plant a tree every few years, the result would be a high rate of genuine economic development. ‘Much of the economic decay of south-east Asia (as of many other parts of the world) is undoubtedly due to a heedless and shameful neglect of trees,’ Schumacher wrote.
[23]
Anticipating a deeply held belief of the Green Movement, he argued that Buddhist economics was hostile to international trade, ‘production from local resources for local needs is the most rational way of economic life, while dependence on imports from afar and the consequent need to produce for export to unknown and distant peoples is highly uneconomic and justifiable only in exceptional cases and on a small scale’.
[24]
  

Similarly, Schumacher favoured renewable resources. ‘Non-renewable goods must be used only if they are indispensable.’
[25]
As with his opposition to international trade, Schumacher did not provide anything that might be described as a chain of economic reasoning supported by evidence. Even the Buddhist tag was a misnomer. The Sermon on the Mount’s blessing of the meek was re-interpreted to mean ‘we need a gentle approach, a non-violent spirit, and small is beautiful’.
[26]
A militant atheist as a young man, Schumacher was received into the Catholic Church in 1971. Responding to a questioner on his final trip to the US, Schumacher said: ‘It was what I call Buddhist economics. I might have called it Christian economics, but then no one would have read it.’
[27]
Schumacher was really the successor to Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton for the 1960s flower-power generation, reaching an audience of millions.