![]() Likewise, when banks launder drug money, when the insurance industry opposes public health care, when the auto industry lobbies against higher fuel-efficiency standards, when arms manufacturers fight any restraint on the trade in guns, when agribusiness opposes limits on the spraying of poisons, when electric utilities evade regulations that would clean up smoke from power plants, when chambers of commerce lobby against efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, they are just as surely condemning vast numbers of people to illness, injury, and death. When tobacco or pharmaceutical companies suppress research that shows their products are killing people, they may not single out particular human beings for execution, yet they deliberately sentence a large number of strangers to premature death. Through its routine practices, this economy subjects people to shoddy products, unsafe working conditions, medical scams, poisoned air and water, propaganda dressed up as journalism, and countless other assaults, all in pursuit of profits. Nothing in nature has been spared - not forests, grasslands, wetlands, mountains, rivers, oceans, atmosphere, nor any of the creatures that dwell therein. We’d be likely to say that it’s not acceptable under any circumstances to treat a person as a commodity, worth so much per pound.Īnd yet this is how our economy treats every portion of the natural world - as a commodity for sale, subject to damage or destruction if enough money can be made from the transaction. Our objection would not be overcome by the assurance that the person still has another arm, another leg, and seems to be getting along just fine. Nor would we entertain the milder suggestion of lopping off someone’s arm or leg and putting it up for sale, even if the limb belonged to our worst enemy. Such calculations seem absurd, of course, because none of us would consider dismantling a human being for any amount of money, least of all someone we love. A child would fetch less, roughly in proportion to body weight. But even with inflation, and allowing for the obesity epidemic, this person you cherish still would not fetch as much as ten dollars on the commodities market. Then recall that if you were to reduce a human body to its elements - oxygen, carbon, phosphorus, copper, sulfur, potassium, magnesium, iodine, and so on - you would end up with a few dollars’ worth of raw materials. To grasp the impact of that confusion, think of someone you love. I would like to focus on a different one - our confusion of financial wealth with real wealth. ![]() ![]() So the crucial question is, why? Why are those of us in the richest countries acting in such a way as to undermine the conditions on which our own lives, the lives of other species, and the lives of future generations depend? And why are we so intent on coaxing or coercing the poorer countries to follow our example? There are many possible answers, of course, from human shortsightedness to selfish genes to otherworldly religions to consumerism to global corporations. By human life I mean not merely the survival of our species, but the quality of our existence, the prospects for adequate food, shelter, work, education, health care, conviviality, intellectual endeavor, and spiritual growth for our kind far into the future. By natural systems I mean the topsoil, forests, grasslands, wetlands, rivers, lakes, oceans, atmosphere, the host of other species, and the cycles that bind them together into a living whole. ![]() ![]() ANYONE WHO PAYS ATTENTION to the state of the planet realizes that all natural systems on which human life depends are deteriorating, and they are doing so largely because of human actions. ![]()
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