Eating the Seed Corn, Post 1

I have been actively blogging to This Sacramental Earth since the middle of June 2011. It's now September 11, a special date. I think it's time I opened up more fully about my worldview and core beliefs.

It's a worldview that's about as radical as you can get.

Leaning Tower
of Pisa

I think our economy, and indeed our whole culture, is a house built on sand. It's like the Leaning Tower of Pisa; the ground underneath is too soft. The edifice can't stand straight, and it keeps tipping over more and more as time goes on.

Why aren't things working out for us as we expected? Because we've gotten out of step with Mother Nature.

The natural world includes us ... we have forgotten that. We have accordingly forgotten that Mother Nature imposes her own hidden patterns on us, and we violate them at our peril.

It's as if we are coloring in Mother Nature's coloring book, and we have been heedlessly coloring outside the lines. Any time now, Mother Nature will have no choice but to take away our crayons.

That is what the present threat of manmade climate change amounts to. Ditto, our destruction of the planet's rainforests. Ditto, our pouring chemicals and silt into our bays, rivers, and wetlands. Ditto, our eradication of innumerable wonderful species that have evolved over millions of years. You name the environmental threat, and I'll include it in the list.


Dysfunctionality: Economic

As I've tried to show in earlier posts, our despoliation of the environment amounts to eating our seed corn. The ultimate source of our economic wealth is nature itself ... yet we forget, as fertile and self-renewing as nature is, that there are limits. The limits amount to the lines in Mother Nature's coloring book, and our greedy crayons continually dash outside those lines with heedless abandon.

So nature just cannot renew itself fast enough to keep up with our greed.

For example, when we take too many tuna and other food fish from the oceans each year, fish populations dwindle. Consuming the 'extra' fish we take each year is like eating our seed corn. We have great abundance now, but at some point down the road we'll impoverish ourselves.


Dysfunctionality: Other

That's an economic argument for deeper environmental awareness and concern. But I think our 'eating the seed corn' habit of consumerist greed makes us dysfunctional in non-economic ways as well.

Let there be no doubt: we are hugely dysfunctional. All you have to do is read the newspapers to see what I mean. Today's paper is, of course, full of recollections of 9/11. When I think of 9/11, I think of both heroism and dysfunction. The radical Islamist movement which spawned the 9/11 attacks was and is incomprehensibly vengeful and hateful. It's hugely dysfunctional. The world is not supposed to work that way.

Further along in today's Washington Post, one finds (it comes as no surprise) that we Americans continue to search for a solution to the Great Recession and an unemployment rate that won't come down. Meanwhile, the richer nations in Europe's 'euro zone' are once again contemplating (resisting?) bailouts for Greece and other poorer nations such as Italy and Spain. This is, of course, economic dysfunction. But it's also political and cultural dysfunction, when Greeks take to the streets in violent protest against their own government's necessary austerity measures, and when armchair pundits wonder why Germans who oppose bailing Greece out aren't taking to the streets as well ... yet.

The world isn't supposed to work that way, either. Why do our economic institutions seem poised on the edge of a precipice?


Dysfunctionality Headlines

A news story in today's paper bears the headline, 'Guns tied to a botched federal weapons-smuggling investigation have been recovered at a second Arizona crime scene ... '. A world in which there is weapons smuggling is bad enough, I'd say. A world in which the 'good guys' (our Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agents) botch investigations of same, and no one is really surprised to hear of it, is downright dysfunctional.

Another dysfunctional headline: 'Gunmen kill two, wound 22 at club'. 'Nuff said.

Another: 'In wildfire-weary Texas, crews expect an extended battle'. The drought and wildfires in Texas are a result of 'global weirding', which is a side effect of climate change. The companion headline 'Many Pa. flood evacuees return to their homes' is about how the same tropical storm, Lee, whose hot winds turned Texas trees into kindling wood, turned the mid-Atlantic states into flood zones.

The headline 'Search continues for oil workers missing off Mexican coast' has to do with the wrath of Tropical Storm Nate. Oil workers from a Texas-based company evacuated an oil structure in Mexico’s Bay of Campeche to elude Nate. Ten of them remained missing as of the filing of the article. They would not have been out on the bay at all, were we not so desperate for fossil fuel. Lives get lost that way. It's dysfunctional, in my view, to have to do so much risky offshore drilling.

Dysfunction is international: 'Fed up with violent crime, Guatemalans head to the polls/Front-runner has offered an iron fist in fight against drug gangs'

I just want to make clear at this point that I'm connecting a whole lot of dots as I try to make a case about how dysfunctional we are. I'm connecting the dots into a picture that isn't a very pretty one ... and then, as I hope it's already perfectly clear, I intend to argue that much or all of our current economic-cultural-political-social-religious dysfunctionality is a byproduct of our insatiable lust for an unsustainable level of material wealth.

It is that feeding frenzy which puts us out of step with Mother Nature, and it is that frenzy along with our maybe-we'll-save-the-environment-later-but-not-now cussedness that sows the seeds of our present dysfunctionality, in all its guises.

That's my core belief.