DESTRUCTION OF NATURE
Humans began ravaging nature long before capitalism
was a gleam in Adam Smith’s eye. Surplus
capitalism, however, has exponentially enlarged the scale
of that ravaging.
I promised no grim numbers, but I’ll cite just
one. In 2005, a United Nations–sponsored research
team reported that roughly 60 percent of the ecosystems
that support life on earth are being used unsustainably.
Such overuse, reported the Millennium Ecosystem
Assessment, increases the likelihood that abrupt,
nonlinear changes will seriously affect human well-being.
The potential consequences include floods, droughts, heat
waves, fishery collapse, dead zones along coasts, sea
level rises, and new diseases.
Thoughtful people can debate whether population or
technology is more responsible than capitalism for our
loss of ecosystems and biodiversity. No doubt all play a
role. But most of the damage isn’t done by the
numerous poor; it’s done by the far fewer rich. The
United States, for example, with 5 percent of the
world’s people, has dumped nearly 30 percent of our
species’ cumulative carbon dioxide wastes into the
atmosphere. It’s our excess consumption,
rather than the poor’s meager gleanings,
that’s the larger problem, and surplus capitalism
is the handmaiden of that excess.
Technology, of course, greatly magnifies our impact on
the planet, but technology by itself is mere know-how.
It’s the choice of technologies, and the scale at
which they’re deployed, that affects the planet.
Electricity, for example, can be generated in many ways.
When corporations choose among them, however, their
choice is driven not by “least harm to
nature,” but by “most bang for the
buck.” And, in doing their calculations, they count
the cost of nature as zero. Hence we have lots of
fossil-fuel burning and little use of solar, wind, and
tidal energy.
The same calculus drives corporations’ approach
to agriculture, logging, and many other activities. The
result is at once humbling and chilling: capitalism as we
know it is devouring creation. It’s living off
nature’s capital and calling it growth. ...
Let’s summarize the history of capitalism thus
far. Since arising in the eighteenth century, capitalism
has changed the face and chemistry of the earth. It keeps
doing so, despite signals of planetary peril, like a
runaway steam engine without a governor. It has built
mountains of private wealth, but much of that wealth was
taken from the commons, and a great deal of it adds
little to our happiness. Its main actors,
profit-maximizing corporations, are essentially out of
control, and the fruits of their exertions are dispensed
in a highly unequal way.
Why does surplus capitalism behave this way?
It’s possible that we consistently hire bad CEOs,
but I think otherwise. I think it’s the operating
system that causes most CEOs to act not with the next
generation, but with the next quarterly statement,
foremost in mind. This suggests that, if we want to
change the outcomes of Capitalism 2.0, we have to upgrade
its operating system.
In Part 2 I’ll describe what a new operating
system could look like. But first, in the next two
chapters, I’ll explain why other remedies, such as
more regulation or more privatization, won’t fix
our current system’s flaws.
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