"A Flaw In Our Thinking"

China starts looking at a new direction:

"In 20 years, China has achieved economic results that took a century to attain in the West," Pan [Yue, vice minister of China's Ministry of Environmental Protection,] says. "But we have also concentrated a century's worth of environmental issues into those 20 years."

He appears unafraid to challenge the "development" path that the Chinese Communist Party has taken for the past three decades: "There has been a flaw in our thinking: The belief that the economy decides everything. If the economy is booming, we thought, political stability will follow; if the economy is booming, we hoped, people will have enough to eat and live contented lives; if the economy is booming, we believed, there will be money everywhere and materialism will be enough to stave off the looming crises posed by our population, resources, environment, society, economy, and culture. But now it seems this will not be enough." ...

The flaw Pan notes is not a flaw the Chinese invented. Rather, it permeates the entire industrialized, and industrializing, world. And it has had a significant cost:

... The cost to poor countries of the climate change that is already taking place, no matter what action we take to reduce emissions, is up to $100 billion per year. ..

Part of that cost is the loss of soil around the world. Another cost is what Italian futurist Bruno Argento describes as precarity:

... We now come to the useful word "precarity," which is part of the American lifestyle but distant from American politics. "Precarity" is, of course, the condition of existing precariously. The condition of losing one's safety and security, of losing predictability and the ability to rationally plan ahead, the condition of being humiliated and in danger. ...

The discipline of economics, which wants so badly to be a science, has been responsible for the notion that price signals can fix everything. Like all utopian fanatics, the free marketeers have stayed true to their faith even as the magic kingdom of optimal outcomes they predicted kept failing to appear.

Take just one problem: water.

Life as we know it is entirely impossible without water, and only around 2 percent of the water on our planet is fresh enough to be used for our purposes. Yet the market has entirely failed to ensure rational distribution or prevent overuse, deregulated privatization has been an utter failure wherever it was tried, and no mechanism has been able to overcome the entrenched water delivery infrastructure that was laid down when it seemed like there would always be plenty more where that came from.

But there isn't much more, especially not for China, as summarized in this Nation interview with Dr. Peter Gleick:

... From what I've read in the newest edition of your book, The World's Water 2008-2009, (Island Press, 2008) it seems that China faces some of the most difficult water challenges on earth, and the trends are only growing worse as climate change intensifies. For example, the glaciers that supply much of China's (and other Asian nations') drinking and irrigation water are melting fast and some portion of them will be lost forever. What is China doing to prepare for the impacts of these and other developments?

Nothing. The glaciers are melting. In China, and in general, nobody is doing anything different.

Since the Tibetan Plateau is a source of drinking and irrigation water for an estimated one billion people--one out of every six people on earth--how will this impact other Asian nations?

For China, the international ramifications of their water policies are vast and under-appreciated. Just about every major Asian river originates in the Tibetan plateau--the Yangtze, the Mekong, the Ganges, the Brahmaputra--there are almost no major rivers that don't derive some of their flow from water that comes out of Tibet. That means whatever happens in Tibet doesn't just affect China, or the Tibetans. And yet there is very little public discussion about the international nature of those water resources. With climate change it will be a growing source of tension in the future. ...

These nations are making up for irrigation shortfalls now by purchasing staple grains from other nations, a roundabout way of importing water. What happens when the water resources of the nations they import from become too low to supply needs at home, when there are more people wanting to import grain than have it to export?

Grain will become more expensive. Demand will fall because potential customers for it will simply die of starvation. But the supply will continue shrinkng, so demand will have to fall farther and farther. This is the only way for the market to solve a food shortage under current circumstances and resource constraints.

Such logic works fine when you're talking about the availability of toasters. It's deeply disturbing to think of it as applying to the lives of human beings.

It outrages all of the ethical constructs that allow us to live together in communities, because no greater value attaches to a necessity of life by virtue of its availability being synonymous with life itself. And where greater value does attach to water in a market system, the instrument of valuation, money, again creates an exclusionary system that by values a life by the ability to generate economic return.

A thorny dilemma to be sure. Though in a system we've created, and whose rules are set by human beings, a bad outcome can't be anyone's fault but the creators and maintainers of that system. If it produces unethical outcomes, the fingers point rightly towards ourselves.

Where do we start to correct this flaw in our thinking, in our social designs, that may lead to the starvation and thirst of millions?

(Photo credit: NASA)