How did we end up with Wall Street when models for a healthy economy are all around us?
posted Jan 17, 2013
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With proper care and respect, Earth can provide a high quality of
life for all people in perpetuity. Yet we devastate productive lands and
waters for a quick profit, a few temporary jobs, or a one-time resource
fix.
Our current expansion of tar sands oil extraction, deep-sea oil
drilling, hydraulic fracturing natural gas extraction, and
mountaintop-removal coal mining are but examples of this insanity. These
highly profitable choices deepen our economic dependence on rapidly
diminishing, nonrenewable fossil-energy reserves, disrupt the generative
capacity of Earth’s living systems, and accelerate climate disruption.
A global economy dependent on this nonsense is already failing and
its ultimate collapse is only a matter of time. For a surprisingly long
time, we humans have successfully maintained the illusion that we are
outside of, superior to, and not subject to the rules of nature. We do
so, however, at a huge cost, and payment is coming due.
To secure the health and happiness of future generations, we must
embrace life as our defining value, recognize that competition is but a
subtext of life’s deeper narrative of cooperation, and restructure our
institutions to conform to life’s favored organizing principle of
radically decentralized, localized decision making and
self-organization. This work begins with recognizing what nature has
learned about the organization of complex living systems over billions
of years.
Our Original Instructions
Some indigenous people speak of the “original instructions.” Chief
Oren Lyons, of the Onondaga Nation, summarizes the rules in “Listening
to Natural Law” in the anthology
Original Instructions:
“Our instructions, and I’m talking about for all human beings, are to
get along … with [nature’s] laws, and support them and work with them.
We were told a long time ago that if you do that, life is endless. It
just continues on and on in great cycles of regeneration. … If you want
to tinker with that regeneration, if you want to interrupt it, that’s
your choice, but the results that come back can be very severe because …
the laws are absolute.”
Decision-making would be local and the system would organize from the bottom up.
Modern neuroscience affirms that the human brain evolved to reward
cooperation and service. In other words, nature has hard-wired the
original instructions into our brain. Extreme individualism, greed, and
violence are pathological and a sign of physical, developmental,
cultural, and/or institutional system failure. Caring relationships are
the foundation of healthy families, communities, and life itself.
We are living out the consequences of our collective human failure to
adhere to the original instructions—the organizing principles of
healthy living systems readily discernible through observation of nature
at work. These are the principles by which we must rethink and
reorganize human economies.
So how would nature design an economy? An economy is nothing more
than a system for allocating resources to productive activity—presumably
in support of life. In fact, nature is an economy, with material and
information exchange, saving, investment, production, and
consumption—all functions we associate with economic activity. Absent
human intervention, as Lyons says, “It just continues on and on in great
cycles of regeneration.”
Nature surrounds us with expressions of the organizing principles
that make possible life’s exceptional resilience, capacity for
adaptation, creative innovation, and vibrant abundance. Earth’s
biosphere and the human body are two magnificent examples.
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Wall Street
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Nature
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| Defining value |
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Money |
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Life |
| Primary performance indicators |
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Growth, financial returns, flows, and assets |
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Life's abundance, health, resilience, and creative potential |
| Primary dynamic |
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Competition to maximize self-interest |
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Cooperation to optimize self- and community interest |
| Decision-making power |
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Global, top-down, centralized, and concentrated |
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Local, bottom-up, and distributed |
| Time frame |
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Immediate return |
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Sustained yield |
| Local character |
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Uniform |
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Diverse |
| Resource control |
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Monopolized |
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Shared |
| Resource flows |
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Global, linear, one-time use from mine to dump |
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Local, circular, perpetual use, zero waste |
| Deficits of concern |
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Financial |
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Social and environmental |
| Measure of efficiency |
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Returns to financial capital |
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Returns to social and natural capital |
| Growth |
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Infinite growth of money and material consumption |
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A stage in life's endless regenerative cycles of birth, growth, death, and rebirth |
The Economy of the Biosphere
Earth’s exquisitely complex, resilient, and continuously evolving
band of life—the biosphere—demonstrates on a grand scale the creative
potential of the distributed intelligence of many trillions of
individual self-organizing, choice-making living organisms. Acting in
concert, they continuously regenerate soils, rivers, aquifers,
fisheries, forests, and grasslands while maintaining climatic balance
and the composition of the atmosphere to serve the needs of Earth’s
widely varied life forms. So long as humans honor the original
instructions, the biosphere has an extraordinary capacity to optimize
the capture, organization, and sharing of Earth’s energy, water, and
nutrients in support of life—including human life.
In nature, species and individuals earn a right to a share in the
bounty of the whole as necessary to their sustenance through their
contribution to the well-being of the whole. Over the long term, those
that contribute prosper, and those that do not contribute expire. The
interests of the whole are protected against rogue behavior by natural
limits on the ability of any individual or species to monopolize
resources beyond its own need to the exclusion of the needs of others.
Individuals and species may compete for territory and sexual
dominance, but the amount of territory or number of mates nature allows
an individual or species to claim is local, limited, and subject to
continuous challenge. Until humans began to create the imperial
civilizations characteristic of our most recent 5,000 years, the idea
that any species, let alone a few individual members of a species, might
claim control of all of Earth’s living wealth to the exclusion of all
others was beyond comprehension.
The Economy of the Body
The human body is a more intimate demonstration of the creative power
of life’s organizing principles. The individual human body comprises
tens of trillions of individual living cells, each a decision-making
entity with the ability to manage and maintain its own health and
integrity under changing and often stressful circumstances. At the same
time, each cell faithfully discharges its responsibility to serve the
needs of the entire body on which its own health and integrity depend.
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Working together, these cells create and maintain a self-organizing
human organism with the potential to achieve extraordinary feats of
physical grace and intellectual acuity far beyond the capability of any
individual cell on its own.
Each decision-making, resource-sharing cell is integral to a larger
whole of which no part or system can exist on its own. Together they
create regulatory mechanisms internal to the whole that work to assure
that no part asserts dominance over the others or monopolizes the body’s
stores of energy, nutrients, and water for its exclusive use. Resources
are shared based on need.
All the while, the body’s cells self-organize to fight off a vast
variety of viruses, cancer cells, and harmful bacteria, adapt to
changing temperatures and energy needs and variations in the body’s food
and water intake, heal damaged tissues, and collect and provide sensory
data to our conscious mind essential to our conscious choice making.
Another of the many impressive expressions of the body’s capacity to
self-organize is the process by which our cells continuously regenerate
while maintaining the body’s integrity as a unified organism. The cells
lining the human stomach have a turnover of only five days. Red blood
cells are replaced every 120 days or so. The surface of the skin
recycles every two weeks. The cells of the body are constantly
reproducing, growing, and dying.
A Human Economy Based on Nature
If nature were in charge of creating an enduring human economy, she
would surely apply the same principles she applies in natural systems.
Her goal would be a global system of bioregional living economies that
secure a healthy, happy, productive life for every person on the planet
in symbiotic balance with the non-human systems on which we humans
depend for breathable air, drinkable water, fertile soils, timber, fish,
grasslands, and climate stability. Each bioregional economy would meet
its own needs for energy, water, nutrients, and mineral resources
through sustained local capture, circular flow, utilization, and
repurposing. Decision making would be local and the system would
organize from the bottom up. Diversity and redundancy would support
local adaptation and resilience.
It
takes humility to recognize that what we’ve called progress isn’t
always for the better. Sometimes nature’s original idea was a better
one.
This should be our goal and vision. With the biosphere as our systems
model, we would design our economic institutions and rules to align
with nature’s rules and organizing principles. We would replace GDP as
the primary measure of economic performance with a new system of living
system indicators that assess economic performance against the outcomes
we actually want—healthy, happy people and healthy, resilient natural
systems. These indicators might be based on Bhutan’s Gross National
Happiness Index. We would redirect the time, talent, and money we
currently devote to growing GDP, material consumption, securities
bubbles, and Wall Street bonuses to producing the outcomes we really
want.
We would favor local, cooperative ownership and control. Organizing
from the bottom up in support of bioregional self-reliance, our economic
institutions would support local decision-making in response to local
needs and opportunities. Cultural and biological diversity and sharing
within and between local communities would support local and global
resilience and facilitate life-serving system innovation.
The result would be an economy based on a love of life that honors
the original instructions and conforms to the organizing principles of
nature, real markets, and true democracy. The challenge is epic in its
proportion and long overdue.
We are Earth’s children; she is our mother. We must honor and care
for her as she loves and cares for us. Together we can forge an integral
partnership grounded in the learning and deep wisdom of her 3.8
billion-year experience in nurturing life’s expanding capacities for
intelligent self-organization, creative innovation, and self-reflective
consciousness.
David Korten wrote this article for
What Would Nature Do?,
the Winter 2013 issue of YES! Magazine. David is board chair of YES!
Magazine. He holds MBA and Ph.D. degrees from the Stanford University
Graduate School of Business and served on the faculty of the Harvard
Business School. His books include
Agenda for a New Economy and the international best seller
When Corporations Rule the World.
Interested?
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