The Great Disruption (28 page)

For motivation and education, take a look at the now legendary animation at www.storyofstuff.com. This twenty-minute
Story of Stuff
by Annie Leonard takes you on an entertaining journey into where all this stuff comes from and the consequences of its manufacture and use. Its message is clear and easy to access—so much so that it has been viewed by twelve million people and been translated into fifteen languages.
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Well worth a look and fun to do with your kids.

Another set of advice came from the United Kingdom's Government Office for Science, which commissioned the NEF to conduct a review of the interdisciplinary work of over four hundred scientists from across the world. The aim was to identify a set of evidence-based actions to improve well-being, which individuals would be encouraged to build into their daily lives. Nic Marks, founder of the Centre for Well-being at the NEF, commenting on the results, said: “The ‘five ways to well-being' are rooted in a wealth of evidence and show that there are simple, positive actions that people can take to improve their well-being. For too long we've measured the health of the nation by how much we are consuming rather than the things that really matter, which is how things are really going for people.” The conclusions from this research were distilled into
Five Ways to Well-being
, which focused on connecting with people, being physically active, taking notice of the world around you, learning new things, and giving to others (which includes volunteering). Notice that shopping didn't rate a mention!
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The science in this area is particularly interesting. According to the NEF: “Studies in neuroscience have shown that cooperative behaviour activates reward areas of the brain, suggesting we are hard wired to enjoy helping one another. Individuals actively engaged in their communities report higher well-being and their help and gestures have knock-on effects for others.”

We've been working on all this in my own family and have been experimenting with some simple ideas to guide us. One that has saved us a great deal of money is the seven-day cooling-off period for major purchases. We agree that once we've chosen something we want to buy, not conceptually but specifically the product, shop, and price we're paying, we defer the purchase for seven days. It's amazing how often after thinking about it, we decide against it. A friend in South Africa has a rule where he takes his young kids grocery shopping, and after they've finished, they have to put back 10 percent of what's in the cart. A friend in the United Kingdom has a family rule that any shopping other than furniture-size items can only be done and brought home by bicycle. The effort involved in the two-mile ride quickly reduces the teenagers' consumption levels.

One of the more successful initiatives we've taken at home is to give to our kids as a birthday or Christmas present control over a family experience. We set rules like cost and location and that we all have to go, then let them decide. Their sense of control and the ability to have the whole family join in
their
chosen activity makes for a lot of fun. My eight-year-old, Grace, suffers through the rugby games, but she has her revenge making her big brothers sit through movies about princesses. So as well as creating memorable family experiences, we are teaching tolerance and sharing, not to mention reducing the piles of plastic toys that otherwise mount in the corners of the bedrooms. It's interesting to note that if I test the kids on what presents they remember from previous years, it's more often the experience ones than the stuff we've given them.

There are some significant assumptions and barriers to overcome in our thinking as well. My two young boys, Jasper and Oscar, love playing online computer games. Eleven-year-old Jasper wanted to subscribe to one for $5 a month from his pocket money. I was railing against it, saying what a con it was that these games got you in by being free and then demanded money to play them at a higher level. “Why would you pay money for something like that?” I asked. “It's just an online game.” His response came back in flash: “Okay, I'll go and spend it on plastic toys, then.” Ouch. Victory to the young fella experiencing the new, low-material-intensity economy. Loss to the old-fashioned father, stuck in his material economy ways. Yes, he subscribed.

So there's a fair bit of new thinking involved in many aspects of these questions. Another one is to recognize the social nature of shopping and how we can not only maintain it, but strengthen it while doing less and different types of shopping. At the community level, there are countless opportunities for this, like “freecycling” networks. These are groups where people give away unwanted goods to other members of their local group who promise to give the goods a decent home—the outcomes include reusing useful stuff, reducing landfill waste, reducing the need to buy new stuff, and, perhaps most important, bringing communities and people together in acts of generosity.

The freecycle idea started when Deron Beal sent out an e-mail to about thirty or forty friends and a handful of nonprofits in Tucson, Arizona. From this small start, the Freecycle Network has grown in just seven years to over seven million people who have joined nearly five thousand local groups in over seventy countries! Every day the network diverts around five hundred tons of waste from landfill. The group's Web site, www.freecycle.org, points out that otherwise carrying away this volume to a landfill would take full garbage trucks piled five times the height of Mt. Everest, just for the last year! And they all feel good about giving things away, as the group's site says: “By giving freely with no strings attached, members of The Freecycle Network help instill a sense of generosity of spirit as they strengthen local community ties and promote environmental sustainability and reuse.”

Sure, it's easy to counter these examples of action with evidence of rampant consumerism elsewhere. Rick Humphries and I had those thoughts standing in Times Square. However, my point is not that these new approaches have yet become mainstream, but that they will. There is now enough evidence around the world of a slowly building backlash against consumerism to argue it will soon erupt firmly into the mainstream marketplace.

Shopping less is not the only type of creative consumer activism we are seeing. One of the more fascinating examples in recent times is that of “carrotmobbing,” which uses shopping as a positive lever for change. Rather than use the stick of a boycott, the organizers of the “carrotmob” use the carrot of promised customers to drive businesses to change. They approach a range of local retailers and invite bids on what action they will take in return for a sudden flood of customers; for example, “What percentage of revenue on a certain day would you spend on an energy-efficiency retrofit?” The best bid wins, and the organizers then mobilize the group through viral e-mails and the like, and that store suddenly finds a rush of new customers. People were going to buy that stuff anyway, they just changed where they did so on the same day for maximum visible impact. In one case, a local convenience store promised to spend 22 percent on an energy retrofit and the carrotmob delivered customers that tripled their normal daily revenue.

This is a powerful idea, especially if it could be applied to large companies as well. Imagine a global campaign to all buy products from one company for a month. As founder Brent Schulkin says about well-directed consumer power: “We are the economy, we decide who gets rich.”

Of course, examples of strong action like carrotmob and the Compact are only a small part of the story. While such approaches will not appeal to everyone, they are, like all bookends of a broader trend, indicative that a larger group is taking less but still significant action in the same direction. There are two categories of such broader actions—a trend toward less consumption overall, as previously discussed, and a shift in consumer expectations of the types of goods they buy and whom they buy them from. Good examples of these include Fair Trade coffee, which has become a dominant market player in many countries, and the rise in organic products.

Studies around this kind of shopping, what is sometimes called the LOHAS market—Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability—indicate a segment in the United States alone worth hundreds of billions of dollars per annum with appeal to over 30 percent of the U.S. consumer market.
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There is now a booming market for organic food and drink, with the U.S. market growing at around three to four times as fast as the nonorganic market.
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With such spectacular growth rates, organics have been picked up as a mainstream segment by most major supermarket chains and food manufacturers.

These trends are leading many major global companies to realize they have to find a way to access this market and appeal to these consumers. How can they deliver more value with less material impact? How can they shift their business model to one of services rather than physical products? How can they build their brand as appealing to these new consumers? How do they market to consumers who are anticonsumer?

My conclusion is that we have a major sleeper trend—one that can easily be observed and monitored by looking both at the bookends of the strong anticonsumer attitudes and in the middle of the trend with committed green consumers, well described by the LOHAS market. With the Great Disruption gathering steam, these trends will inevitably grow, with far-reaching economic and social consequences, including many substantial new business opportunities.

So what else is going to happen in this new economy? What will it mean for business, for communities, and for our working lives? And if poverty isn't going to be dealt with via growth, what are we going to do about it?

CHAPTER 17

No, the Poor Will
Not
Always Be with Us

I was brought up in the Methodist Church, which has always had a particularly strong focus on social issues and poverty. My grandfather Jasper Gilding was a minister in the church, and he and my grandma Kathleen lived and breathed those values. As a result, they also manifested strongly in our upbringing, through the attitudes and level of community engagement I witnessed in my parents, Wesley and Ruth.

While we weren't a devoutly religious family, we went to church every Sunday, and my parents spent their working lives in jobs engaged with disadvantaged people, from children's homes to homeless shelters to elder care. One of the interesting side benefits, unusual for a family in suburban Adelaide, was that we often had people staying at our house from far-flung lands, generally visiting students or religious people engaged in social issues. One of these visitors was a Vietnamese monk, Thich Nhat Hanh. Little did I know back in 1965 that he would go on to become one of the world's great Zen masters and peace activists, giving birth to the concept of engaged Buddhism. Nhat Hanh formed a friendship with Martin Luther King Jr., convincing him to publicly oppose the Vietnam War. King nominated Nhat Hanh for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967.

In a rare interview in 2010, Nhat Hanh, now 84, commented on the issues we are discussing here, saying, “The situation the Earth is in today has been created by unmindful production and unmindful consumption. We consume to forget our worries and our anxieties. Tranquilizing ourselves with over-consumption is not the way.”

Very insightful comments but back when I was six years old he was just a kind and gentle man wearing funny clothes! We lived in a simple house in the suburbs, and all this was a natural part of our lives. Perhaps as a result of this upbringing and cultural context, I grew up thinking it was ridiculous that society tolerated so many of our people suffering grinding multigenerational poverty. The older I get, the more ridiculous it seems.

There are deep and complex issues involved here that go to the core of who we are and, more important, who we want to be. They are central to the questions we're covering in this book because as we respond to the coming crisis, our focus is on building a civilized and sustainable society. We can certainly not consider ourselves to be civilized while we accept extreme poverty.

Our solution to poverty has for a long time focused around economic growth. We thought we could lift people out of poverty simply by increasing the amount of stuff and wealth in the whole system, without having to engage in the difficult question of redistribution of wealth—everyone could have more, so everyone could be happy!

Of course, there has long been a significant social movement calling for us to take stronger action to eliminate poverty and realize our full potential as humanity. Joining millions of people around the world who campaign on such issues have been rock star activists like Bob Geldof and Bono, who have engaged the broad public with excellent campaigns like “Make Poverty History.” But fundamentally, the response has still been premised on economic growth, the idea that everyone could have more.

The logic and morality of this call to end poverty have grown stronger as we have grown richer. Global economic growth has meant that there is now more than enough to go around. We produce more calories, for example, than are needed to sustain the world population. What is true of food is also true of water, energy, and other resources—economic growth has ensured that today we live in a world of plenty where no one need suffer extreme poverty with respect to global capacity—the problems lie elsewhere.

And yet, as we know and to our great shame, 1.4 billion people continue to live in extreme poverty, generally defined as living on less than $1.25 a day. Free marketeers have long argued that economic growth and global markets would sort this out, and that argument was not without merit. Especially in China and India, economic growth has lifted millions out of poverty and created a new global middle class. The income differential between China and the West has decreased substantially, with GDP per capita increasing in China a huge sevenfold between 1978 and 2004.
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Throughout this period, China has sustained growth rates that are the envy of the developed world.

But along with these success stories, there are significant failures. The UNDP calculated in 2002 that assuming global progress continued at the same pace, it would take 130 years to rid the world of hunger. Progress is also inconsistent among countries. While the West experienced two decades of sustained economic growth in the 1980s and 1990s, only twenty developing countries managed to experience sustained growth over that period. No fewer than forty other developing countries went through at least five years of stagnation or a fall in per capita income.

While some of this economic growth trickled down, a disproportionate amount stayed at the top. In 2000 the top 1 percent of the world's population owned around 40 percent of the world's wealth, with the top 10 percent owning 85 percent. At the other end, the bottom half of the world's people share just 1 percent of the world's wealth among them.
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The story on income is no better, with the top 20 percent of people earning 74 percent of it. Despite improvement in some countries, the trends are not all good. Whereas the average African was almost eleven times poorer than the average North American or Australian/New Zealander in 1950, they were over nineteen times poorer by 2000.
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It seems the economic growth over the last 50 years has defied gravity and floated up rather than trickled down as the theory argued it would. This is not just about inequality and fairness, this is often grinding, brutal poverty. According to UNICEF, in 2001, 51 percent of Ethiopian children under five were stunted because of chronic malnutrition. Such stories and statistics can be found around the world.

Unfortunately, even though economic growth has been fostering some admirable improvements, it clearly hasn't been going far enough. When faced with such absolute and despairing poverty in the context of such massive global wealth, waiting another 130 years to eliminate hunger is not a projection to be proud of. Not to mention the questionable morality of the basic idea—that if we let the rich get richer and richer, little amounts of their leftover wealth would trickle down to the poor, bringing them out of extreme poverty. Explain that to an Ethiopian mother with a child stunted from malnutrition.

Of course, I'm just summarizing here the arguments that have been put forward for many decades. The immorality of poverty, the power of markets and growth to drive change, the need for a fairer distribution of growth, the importance of poor countries having strong economies and open markets, and so on have all attracted significant discussion.

It's time to move on. None of these arguments matter much anymore.

That game is up. As we covered earlier, our current model of economic growth, the one that is bringing some of the poor out of poverty, works to make the rich richer as well. Of course, this isn't a practical problem for the poor if it brings them out of extreme poverty. The problem is that the size of the economy needed to achieve this outcome is not possible. So, for example, if we were to aspire to global incomes at, say, EU levels and have them grow modestly at 2 percent per year, with the poor being brought up to that level over the next forty years, the global economy would have to increase to fifteen times today's size by 2050. Remembering we're currently running at 140 percent of the planet's capacity this is of course an absurd proposition.

Even assuming dramatically less progress on poverty than that, we would still be so far past the physical limits that it would remain impossible. Remember, not difficult or inconvenient or challenging. Impossible.

Understanding this profoundly changes the game in many areas, but perhaps nowhere more so than with respect to poverty and inequality. As well as removing the solution we've been investing our hope in, the end of growth has far-reaching impacts on global geopolitics and national social stability. Perhaps most critical—and affecting every country, not just the poor ones—it smashes the general consensus among the public upon which our economic model relies: that the system will ultimately work for everyone if we give it time.

Economic growth has for a long time been the relief valve on the pressure cooker of global society.
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For the poor, whether defined as those in extreme poverty or those at the bottom end of wealthy countries, the hope of one day being lifted from poverty is what often makes the huge differentials in wealth tolerable. Never having experienced growing prosperity themselves, some of the poorest do not cling to this hope. But their leaders and the developing countries' elite certainly do, and their complete geopolitical focus is on lifting their countries and their people out of poverty through economic growth. They see successes in other countries, and they want their turn. With the end of growth, this source of hope and focus disappears. Do we expect the poor to now accept their poverty as permanent, since no more economic wealth can be created?

In a similar way, the mentality that embraces the principle of economic growth allows us to morally justify the poor in the West as well. The Great American Dream, built upon the foundation of economic growth, suggests that anyone who works hard can improve himself and increase his wealth. In this context, many believe the poor are at least to some degree lazy or incompetent. They are poor by their own actions or lack thereof. Accepting the end of economic growth means that this idea, at best highly debatable, can no longer be argued. If the amount of wealth overall can't increase, you can improve your wealth only by taking away from someone else. The American Dream is dead. The only way to lift the bottom is to drop the top.

Ouch. Not only do we have to face the end of economic growth, but now we have to discuss the most heretical idea of all: redistribution. We'll come back to this shortly.

So the stability of our system has depended upon a gigantic relief valve, which is now broken. To make matters worse, we can reliably assume the unfolding crisis that is forcing the end of economic growth will not only undermine
reductions
in poverty, it will reverse them and drive the poor back down the scale, because of the severe challenges to water and food supply and an increase in climatic extremes.

With disparity rapidly worsening and the escape route closing, pressure in the system will build up until it explodes, unless we take alternative action.

How can we respond? I see two alternatives. One that is put to me when I present on this topic is that we “let nature takes its course,” that this process is the system getting back into balance. While people rarely put it to me in these terms, what they mean is we let the poor starve and their countries collapse. Leaving aside the morality of this position, it is inconceivable this could happen without massive disruption globally, including profound and destabilizing global security impacts.

What people don't think through is what that actually looks like. We would not, if we took that choice, have two, three, or four billion poor people quietly going away to die in a far-flung corner of the world. While we can't know just how it will develop, it doesn't take much to imagine how it might unfold.

A global economic crash combined with widespread food shortages, would probably see the desperate slide of nations and regions into chaos. We would see failed states with nuclear arms and countless other weapons being taken over by dictators and terrorists. We would see refugees by the hundreds of millions, if not billions. Yes, some would be too weak or ill equipped to travel far, but many would move first as their countries collapsed around them.

This would not be, as we have seen in past crises, a few million people on isolated roads moving into refugee camps. This would be whole countries of people walking into neighboring states, and they would be desperate, starving people with nothing to lose.

So when we think about “nature taking its course,” we should consider what that means and how we would respond at the time. What would we do if whole nations started to collapse, and what would the implications be for the global economy? We could not then deliver widespread aid because the conditions would be overwhelming and highly unstable in terms of security. At its most simple and brutal, would we let whole regions collapse into chaos and draw lines on the map we would “defend”—declaring no-go zones of regions of the world? Would our militaries be able to defend these lines if hundreds of millions of starving, desperate people approached them? How would the politics of the countries that hadn't collapsed respond to such human calamity?

In a globalized world there is nowhere to hide, no barricade high enough, and the whole thing would be live on the TV in your lounge room. It is a short journey from this kind of situation to the global collapse we need to avoid at all costs.

This is why, as we discussed earlier, our militaries are looking at these issues very seriously. They see these trends emerging, and they don't intend to wait until then to think them through.

The respected British defense think tank the Royal United Services Institute concluded in a comprehensive review of the subject in 2008: “In the next decades, climate change will drive as significant a change in the strategic security environment as the end of the Cold War. If uncontrolled, climate change will have security implications of similar magnitude to the World Wars, but which will last for centuries.”
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Take particular note of the last two words—“for centuries.”

Another study looking at the relationship between temperatures and civil war in sub-Saharan Africa in recent decades concluded that civil wars there are likely to increase 50 percent by 2030. That level of conflict likely means millions of deaths—and an international impact.
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A more complete—and more disturbing—picture is provided in Gwynne Dyer's book
Climate Wars.
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Dyer, a military and international affairs journalist with a good understanding of the science, portrays the collapse of the European Union in the 2030s as northern African refugees overrun southern Europe and southern Europeans flee to the northern states to escape an expanding Sahara. In his scenario, the 2030s also see nuclear war between India and Pakistan over water resources and a completely militarized U.S.-Mexican border as America seeks to keep out massive waves of immigrants.