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| Kitchen time! |
Labor
Day weekend was busy. Sun, rain, company at home, many holiday-makers in
Northport, meals and sleep, lots of books going to new homes, with here and there some quiet
time for a dog walk or, lower on Sarah’s priority list, a short grooming session.
Reading, too, of course, even if it had to happen at 3 a.m. while the rest of
the world slept.
American
Stranger,
a novel by David Plante, came to me as an ARC from Delphinium Books. While it
was enjoyable reading, I have to say I expected more. Nancy’s parents fled the
Nazis in Berlin but never speak of those days. She grows up believing that her
parents’ furniture came with them from Germany and only learns as an adult that
they bought it all in New York. But that is the extent of the revelations from
their old life. There is a vague reference to “the president” asking people
what they can do for their country but no more politics than that. I understand
that the novel had to do with Nancy’s life, not the life of the greater United
States. Still, it seems odd that the world around her wouldn’t seep into her
thoughts now and then. I would have liked to get out of the bedroom more, I
guess.
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| Pause en route |
From
fiction I turned to another book on economics and am finding that fascinating
and very, very important. I’m trying to think back to my days as an office
worker at Western Michigan University and topics covered in the
interdisciplinary Environmental Studies course: Did those students perhaps read
Herman Daly? The first edition of Steady-State Economics came out in 1977, so
it’s entirely possible. I’ll have to ask my friend who was the program advisor,
but if I knew the name back then I’d forgotten it.
My
introduction or re-introduction, whichever it was, to Herman E. Daly in the 21st
century came, as does much of my environmental/scientific news, by way of Acres
USA,
a magazine that calls itself “The Voice of Eco-Agriculture.” With their
Eco-Update and Industrial Ag Watch news sections, I keep abreast of
developments that don’t necessarily make NPR or the top newspapers in the
country, but another fantastic feature is the interview in every issue. (I’m
trying to get the editorial people to pull a few years’ worth of interviews
together into a book. I would be thrilled to have that for sale at Dog Ears!)
September’s interviewee was Herman Daly himself, and I was so impressed by what
he said in the magazine pages that I tracked down a few of his books.
Daly
went from being a professor of economics to senior economist in the Environment
Department of the World Bank. He co-founded and was associate editor of the
journal Ecological Economics. As emeritus professor from the School of
Economics, University of Maryland, he currently serves on the executive board
of the Center for the Advancement of Steady State Economy. The
essays in Steady-State Economics do not form a quick or easy read, but they
are clearly written and understandable to any educated person willing to take
the time.
Daly
holds his opinions strongly and with good reason. In his preface to the second
edition ((1991), he notes the omission of serious consideration for any works
of “even remotely ‘Malthusian’” economics, including his own, by the majority
of American economists who reject such theories and such works without
examination. He quotes Daniel Raymond’s rejection of Malthus, Raymond who wrote
simply that “the mind instinctively revolts at the conclusions....” Daly goes
on:
It might be said in Mr. Raymond’s defense that one is not obliged to accept an unwanted or counterintuitive conclusion just because one cannot immediately find a logical or factual error in the argument leading to it. One might legitimately say, “I need to think about that.”
The
thing is that they didn’t bother to think about it or examine it or
consider it, and here Daly is stern:
[T]o refute an argument one must find either a factual error in the premises or a logical error in the reasoning. If after an extended time no such error can be found, then, contrary to Mr. Raymond’s view, one must bow to the conclusion of the argument. If the reader is annoyed with me at this point for unnecessarily reminding everyone about the elementary rules of argumentation, then I am glad. But experience has taught me that many people cannot distinguish an argument from a fulmination and are equally convinced (or unmoved) by either, depending only on whether or not the conclusion fits their established mind set.
(Is
anyone else reminded here of the Heath and Heath book I brought forward recently? The well-supported contention in Switch: How to Change Things When
Change Is Hard
that logic is not enough, that people also need a motive to change their minds
and behavior? Well, that is an important insight, but for now I only bookmark
it and suggest to those who missed the earlier post to check it out.)
The
one big, big,
big
idea underlying steady-state economics is that “the economy” (an abstraction with
no clear real-world referent) is not a closed, man-made system but
an open system
depending on low-entropy inputs from the natural world. Human beings convert
raw material matter-energy into more artifacts and more people -- we reproduce
ourselves as well as adding to the world’s “stuff” -- and output waste of all
kinds. Some of our waste is recyclable, but even recycling takes time, so that
even recyclable waste builds up, while a lot of our waste is nothing nature is
equipped to recycle at all. The goal of unending economic growth, therefore,
nothing more than a recipe by which we will bury ourselves in waste and
ecological disaster.
Why
have most economists not seen this?
Because
they are too enamored of abstract mathematical models to allow the intrusion of
the biosphere into their schemes, too committed to what Daly calls (and I love
his dark humor) “crackpot rigor,” “scientistic pretension,” and the “blind
aping of the mechanistic methods of physics,” at the same time that they ignore
the laws of thermodynamics that would alert them to natural limits.
And
because no one wants the bad news. “Growth” is seen as positive for two
reasons. First, it’s the basis of power for nations; second, it’s an
alternative to sharing. Daly puts it pithily: “It offers the prospect of more
for all with sacrifice by none....”
Take
the question of American agriculture “feeding the world.”
The drive to increase agricultural productivity leads to the replacement of low-yield species by newly developed high-yield species, which results in greater homogeneity of crops, that is, in a reduction in the diversity of the genetic stock and consequently a greater vulnerability to future pest and disease mutants. The increased vulnerability of the monoculture calls for even more protection by pesticides. [GMO seeds modified to be resistant to pesticides have only accelerated this vicious upward spiral.] In addition, more inputs of fertilizer and fresh-water irrigation are required by “green revolutions,” with resulting problems of water pollution and shortage.
It
isn’t only farmers whose livelihood depends on soil and sun and rain. Everyone
on earth is in the lifeboat together. Look at today’s newspaper. Any day's news!
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| "National Minstrel" |
One
of the reason I am so proud to sell so many used books is that these
‘artifacts’ (in Daly’s language) are still fulfilling their purpose as human
artifacts, still conveying the ideas of their authors, still useful, not waste. And because I know how long books can live, when properly cared for, I feel good about selling new books, too. Here are a few
places where I’ve written about questions of and books about resource use,
production, “stuff,” books, etc.:
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| Copyright 1836 |
