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Scorning simple life to our real peril

By Wan Lixin | February 26, 2009, Thursday | Print Edition

THE Wen Hui Bao dedicated a whole page on Monday to some articles under the startling headline: "Save the Earth."

Originally appearing in an October issue of UK-based New Scientist weekly, these articles are authored by noted scientists and economists.

They cover important issues: the perception of economic growth as central to human life, the canonization of GDP, and the clamor for "progress."

Their undertone of despair contrasts sharply to the prevailing indifference and complacency.

What keeps Canadian geneticist David Suzuki awake at night is the question "Is anything more important than the environment?" and why we use economic standards to define "progress."

When the writing on the wall is everywhere, and even the most insensitive can no longer pretend to be in a state of total bliss, appeals are made to their imaginative power.

Politicians pin their hopes on future technology as ultimate fixes.

"They believe humans are so creative and productive that the sky's the limit, that if we run out of resources, we'll find substitutes. If the substitutes run out, we'll go to the moon," Suzuki observes.

The 18th century European Enlightenment movement has been celebrated as a great liberation of human faculties, namely reason, but the mess we have created looks more like a mockery of homo sapiens (wise).

"What kind of intelligent creature, knowing that these are our crucial limitations, would act as if we can use Earth as a garbage can and not pay a price for that?" Suzuki asks.

But upbringing, experience, education, and the media continue to mislead the delusioned optimists who believe everything is turning for the better.

Recently a colleague of mine frankly expressed her repugnance at the mere idea of farming. "Who can honestly view farming life as more desirable than office work?" she retorted.

She has stuck with city life all her life and has the proverbial difficulty of "telling beans from wheat," but that does not lessen her abhorrence for farming.

It does not occur to her that this kind of existence, contemptuously perceived as "primitive," had been sustaining human existence until quite recently.

How does the hardship of wringing something from the land compare to the resignation of an office clerk confined in a stuffy room and staring all day at a flickering computer screen?

As researcher Kate Soper observes in the same issue of New Scientist, "It doesn't help that virtually all representations of pleasure and the life we should aspire to come from advertising, with its incessant message that our happiness is dependent on consuming ever more 'stuff'."

Standard of living

"Work-dominated and materially encumbered affluence" is the basis for the condescension we assume over our ancestors.

In those days, people did not have advertisements, cars, and gyms, but they had clean air, clear streams, tranquil space for reflection, and they celebrated their sensual experience in poems.

One of the catch terms dismissing life that does not leave a considerable ecological footprint is "standard of living."

Standard of living, as we can see, can be simply calibrated to the possession of material goods, or even simpler, to the amount of energy we consume.

"But if you judge standard of living by quality of life, by your relationships with other people and your community, then I say that truly sustainable communities offer a far preferable way to live," Suzuki observes.

During the Spring Festival, I observed that one of the rituals prefacing any banquet was to congratulate ourselves that our standard of living has improved so much that our celebration is little different from any other day.

This reminded me of my childhood anticipation of the festival, and the routine challenge of luring my own son to a dinner table with all kinds of blandishments.

While most other species are fighting a losing battle to survive, humans congratulate themselves on lost appetite.

They drive to a gym 10 kilometers away to walk on a treadmill so as to work out their unneeded calories.

This refusal to walk has far-reaching repercussions.

We are draining the earth of its oil, poisoning our air and water, generating noise, and intimidating pedestrians.

As all the above consequences are pro-GDP, there is a global effort to bail out the troubled auto makers.

World Bank economist Herman Daly observes that "we count as desirable growth both the beneficial activity that causes pollution and the costly activity of cleaning up the pollution."

Thus cutting down trees and selling the lumber both boosts GDP, as we subtract nothing for the loss of forests.

While the perception is there, there is precious little in what we can do.

While Wen Hui Bao devoted one page to "Save the Earth" on Monday, the next day it dedicated four pages to the auto industry.

As Suzuki complained, "When you talk to politicians, they're just focused on the next election. When you talk to business people, they're just focused on the quarterly report."

Heed Daley's warning, especially if you are parents: "As long as our economic system is based on chasing economic growth above all else, we are heading for environmental, and economic, disaster."

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