Accounting For Nature: Moving Toward Resource-Based

Economics

Stephen L. Doll

1994

Published in:

 The Northwest Technocrat, 4th quarter 1994, No. 337

Did you ever notice that the crew members of the starship Enterprise have
no wallet bulges, no purses to lug around? Space-age technology and
phasers on stun may seem far removed from old growth forests and Florida
scrub jays, but in a steadily deteriorating world, often traded off for
financial expediency, the moneyless scenarios Trekkies and science fiction
prognosticators portray may not be flights of fancy for some future date,
but an immediate must for survival of life forms on the Blue Planet (Earth).

The evidences are compelling. Devastation for dollars takes on ominous

proportions. Roman ringmasters decimated territorial animal populations
for theater games. Today's technologies have us doing it globally to
propitiate the god of accumulating purchasing power. Entrepreneurs
peddle everything from saguaro cactuses to soup made from tiger's sex
organs. Rats devour crops in Southeast Asia, because the snakes have been
sold for their skins. To pay their debts, nations savage resources from their
own populations. The simple Mayans of Guatemala, who got along fine for
hundreds of years without money, have sold off their heritage to vacation-
home developers, leaving them landless and destitute, dependent on the
droppings of quirk some turistas.

How did we arrive at such a state that even efforts to save the planet must
await the requisite of money? How has the economic social mechanism we
use to distribute the products of the earth become so removed from the
physical nature of the earth?

Once we lived more with nature. Then as crop cultivation enabled humans
to produce more than immediately needed, human enterprise became too
cumbersome for simple barter. A medium, money, was selected, desirable
because of its scarcity. The medium wasn't the tangible goods being
distributed, but it was something one could touch and feel. Each
progressive change in the financial mechanism -- from tangibles to paper
tokens to plastic credit -- has further removed the money system from the
physical world. The mechanism is now based on confidence in the
capability of the medium to compound upon itself. Debt fueling the fires of
consumption is created at a computer keyboard. This expansionist quality
of money runs directly counter to earth's processes. While no one would
consider a bank account that doesn't draw interest, we adhere to a
paradigm (a pattern or example) of growth and consumption that is no
longer appropriate.

Technology, driven by a synthesized reward system, has prompted a steady

withdrawal from awareness of the source of our physical existence. Radical
changes in the time-rate of converting energy have effectively decoupled us
from the rhythms of the natural world. The fate of resources that took eons
to develop is being negotiated at speeds now measured in quadrillionths of
a second.

The magic of buy-now, pay-later has accelerated consumption far beyond

pay-as-you-go budgets. Lotteries and big-win sweepstakes promise to
condense lifetimes of purchasing power into one big grab. Retailers clear
land to erect huge buildings and parking lots to hawk their wares, then
close up shop and do it again a couple of miles away to engage in
"competition" with another retailer offering the same merchandise across
the street. Duplications, redundancy and waste abound.

In our arrogant disassociation from our roots, nature is ignored, not

cohabited with. The language that speaks to the economic human in
seductive terms of revenue generated speaks not of the sedate silence of
the redwood forest, but of the picnic tables and lawn furniture to be drawn
from it. If it can't be sold, what good is it?
A New Way Of Thinking

The imperative of planetary survival calls for the human species to adopt a
new way of thinking that requires a careful stewardship of nature that we
have denied being a part of.

Modern suggestions for redefining economics in physical terms go back at

least to the thirties, when a social movement known as Technocracy
proposed replacing money with an energy accounting system that would
guarantee every citizen an equal share of a bountiful, but resource-
conscious, production. This was not mere Depression-era whimsy. It
followed an exhaustive fourteen-year study of the resource and industrial
potential of North America. This new social design had the potential of
lifting the nation out of the Depression and husbanding resources for future
generations. But the pressures of reactionary influences were too powerful,
so, opting for status quo-saving measures like New Deals and wars, FDR and
big business rejected it.

But how about compromise? In 1978, the accounting firm of Seidman and
Seidman advised its clients to adopt a dual accounting system in both
money and BTU's. Like the Technocrats' proposal, it never became public
policy. It's too hard to fudge with measurable quantities, too easy with the
ability to hoard currency.

Another attempt at compromise was the most recent foray into tangible
accounting, the BTU tax measure, but this too was foiled by pressure from
the American Energy Alliance, an oil-fired "grass roots" movement of some
2000 small businesses who eagerly lapped up all Big Oil had to say about
job losses if the tax went through.

While nature's laws are immutable, social systems are not. They must
change with the conditions or the system dies. If debt overload does not
force the issue (budgetary shortfalls already account for many doable
things left undone), nature surely will. We will then have a return to reality
forced on us.

How may the transition be made? How will we literally turn our thinking
from dollars to doughnuts?
It is happening, however haltingly. The Clinton administration's proposed
biodiversity survey is one step. It will surely be watered down by parochial
and political deal-cutting, but it is a step.

Sparked by the oil crunch of the Seventies, energy management is now a

growth industry, the thrust being energy not used is dollars saved. It
doesn't always apply, however, or even work, particularly in the all- you-
can-eat, volume-pricing market driven economy that is the apotheosis of
affordability.

For example, at recent summer convocation of energy engineers held in a

convention center in Atlanta, participants remarked at the frigid
temperature in the huge building. The reason: a ratcheting rate structure
that charges high-volume users less per kilowatt hour. This "the more you
buy, the more you save" philosophy -- the incentive to shop 'til one drops --
permeates every phase of our economic structure. This is an absolute
failure of conventional economics to conserve resources.

A Radical Change

Converting to a resource-based economy will require a monumental

change in our thinking. In the new, resource-oriented system, concern with
durability, not return sales of shoddy goods, will be the economic
paradigm. Maximization of benefit with MINIMUM IMPACT ON NATURAL
SYSTEMS will be the criteria for all human enterprise -- not more bang for
the buck, but more utility from the erg. In a resource-based economy, old
value systems based on material reward for investment of time and capital
will give way to a new incentive of achievement. Even the vaunted job as a
source of income becomes an anachronism, particularly the paradox of
rewarding people for consuming resources in needless, redundant
production with tokens to consume more resources. From a resource
standpoint, we'd be far better off paying people to stay home.

Tree huggers and technologists will have to come to terms on a common

direction. Earth scientists will not be mere hirelings to bottom-line,
business-run government. They will be the government, the shapers of
policy. Everything will be recycled, from concrete to plate scrapings for the
generation of gases to be used for fuel.
With automated production directed toward efficient use rather than
showy sale, the human work load will be restructured to reduced work
schedules. A uniformly high standard of living will require incomes in the
form of energy credits, to all, without regard to interpretations of
contribution, or moral judgments, but as a basic human right. Obviously,
everyone can't have everything. This does not mean that people can't have
access to everything we can produce. We don't have to dispense with the
comforts we now enjoy; rather, we must develop and apportion them with
an eye toward a measured abundance. Free access, not mortgaged
acquisition, is the new consumerism. To anyone who has ever rented a car
or used a public library or park, it shouldn't be hard to adjust to. The main
difference would be that the car rental would be in the form of a charge
against one's energy account -- a bookkeeping chore, not interference or a
prohibition.

The social and environmental ramifications will be enormous. No longer will

any living thing, human or otherwise, be relegated to the status of a cash
crop. Not a single tree will be cut, a single river dammed, a single building,
automobile, or missile produced for the sake of sales or job creation.

Cities, housing, transportation, production of goods -- all will be

restructured to synch with natural constraints, not with the demands of
motivation for material gain. Technology will no longer be an instrument of
human domination, but of management. Computers now used to monitor
the flow of debt and one-up-manship will be turned to monitoring the flow
of energy and resources. Consumption will be instantly recorded, and
production set accordingly, eliminating the need for excessive warehousing.
Instead of monitoring people, devices will keep electronic fingers on the
earth's pulse.

Ironically, the same labor-saving technologies that led to the rise of the
monetary system may well consign it to oblivion. Technological abundance
will drive prices down while technological production eliminates wage
earners and taxpayers. It's chancy, though. There is the very real danger
that accelerated resource depletion will leave us with a great deal of
manufactured money but little to spend it on.
Even now, free trade agreements to enable debtor nations to satisfy their
creditors portend environmental chaos. The Great Global Swap Meet
promises to open new vistas of plunder, both in resources drawn to
produce trade goods and in the energy it will take to transport redundancy
around the globe.

If the practices that now prevail in market economics does not leave vast
populations warring over dwindling resources, it is probable that with a
heightened awareness of our oneness with nature, a corresponding
awareness of fellowship with others of the same species will follow. With
an objective and impartial system for distributing the products of nature,
we would not be so prone to regard others, human or otherwise, as threats
to our own economic well-being. No longer would we behave as
competitive predators, but as mutual guardians.

Whatever the form social institutions take, measuring, developing and

distributing the products of the earth with concern for social consequences
merits consideration right now. The reclamation and stewardship of the
earth must no longer be subjected to the delaying tactics of reward-
oriented market economics, but directed to the higher goal of common
survival.

Perhaps, if and when we arrive at some future date, scholars of a post-

monetary era will view our lumbering garbage trucks and sprawling
population centers much as we view stone axes and chamber pots. Even
more amazing to them, probably, will be how we survived so long trading
off our real wealth -- our natural heritage -- in diehard subjection to
something as insubstantial as the flow of imaginary I.O.U.'s