| Why are you
so angry?
Modern man is wrecking the planet and doing so at an increasingly
rapid rate. Our remaining forests are being systematically
clear cut or simply burned, our agricultural land compacted,
eroded, desertified or water-logged and salinised by modern
irrigation methods, our waters contaminated with agricultural
and industrial chemicals or slowly depleted with the growing
cultivation of water-intensive cash crops, our rivers turned
into open sewers or transformed into torrents that only flow
during the rainy season, our wetlands drained, our coral reefs
grubbed up or poisoned, and just about everything contaminated
with as many as a hundred thousand different chemicals, only
5 per cent of which have even been tested – and in a
very summary manner at that – for their toxic effects
on different forms of life. “Why are more people not
angry?” I might ask.
So is Edward Goldsmith the quintessential prophet
of doom?
Far from it, though some like to describe me that way. In
truth I am trying to move us away from doom. In ‘A Blueprint
for Survival’, a special issue of ‘The Ecologist’
that was published in January 1972 and which sold half a million
copies in 17 languages, we pointed out that: “The principal
defect of the industrial way of life, with its ethos of expansion
is that it is not sustainable.” We also said that it
would come to an end within the lifetime of someone born today,
unless it was extended by a powerful minority at the cost
of suffering imposed on the majority of mankind.
More than 30 years later I stand by the statement, but must
admit the modern industrial system has been more resilient
than I had originally thought. Also, the natural world seems
more capable of absorbing the increasingly destructive impact
of industry. But the longer this industrial society lasts,
and the more developing countries are brought sucked into
its orbit, the further we will have strayed from a sane, stable,
‘sustainable’ world. And when the inevitable collapse
comes about, it will be all that more traumatic.
As President of the Climate Initiatives Fund and
a Board member of the International Forum on Globalisation
is this, then, your message to India?
I have no message. Just two questions: Where is the spiritual
wellspring that once characterised India and was championed
by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi? And, who will feed India in
a world wounded by climate change?
Did you get your answers at the World Social Forum
in Mumbai?
Yes and no. Most participants at the WSF were not aware of
the extent to which the sentiment “another world is
possible” depends on our ability to maintain earth’s
ecological balance. But, equally, many key thinkers from across
the world do share our concerns. They look to India’s
ancient traditions and philosophies for inspiration.
So what is the kernel of your communication about
our ecological circumstances?
Essentially, that the environment most friendly to the needs
of living things is the one to which they have been adapted
by their evolution and upbringing. It’s common sense.
A tiger is adapted by evolution and upbringing to living in
the jungle, which provides the tiger’s optimum environment.
It is the jungle that can best satisfy its physical and psychological
requirements; it is the food it finds there that the tiger
has best been adapted to eating, and the smells encountered
there that it has best been adapted to detecting, interpreting,
reacting and enjoying.
Presumably this also applies to humans?
There is no reason to suppose that Homo sapiens is in any
way exempt from this fundamental principle. We, too, survive
and flourish best in the environment in which we evolved.
But we are so radically altering that environment as to threaten
our own future.
You wrote in 1990 that we had ‘5,000 Days
to Save the Planet’. The deadline expires in November
2004. Like Cassandra, have you, perhaps, been ignored?
Ignored? Far from it. But remember 5,000 days was the deadline
to set in place the global mind-shift, the start of the journey
to save the planet. This involves deconstructing the urban
nightmare and laying a worldwide foundation for a shift back
to community life, with wholly different infrastructures for
community living. Today education, for instance, is little
other than a springboard for destructive lifestyles that masquerade
as development. It must be turned on its head to create citizens
who respect and work in harmony with the planet, rather than
in conflict with it. We also need to de-link from fossil fuels
and mega watts to what Amory Lovins calls ‘nega-watts’.
This involves energy efficiency regimes and alternate fuels
that provide real development, in place of the power plants
that poison us, mines that tear up ecosystems and nuclear
wastes that will kill our progeny. This is not a negotiable
agenda. It is an imperative and will take five decades, not
5,000 days, to implement.
Are economists the stumbling blocks?
You seem to suggest they might actually wind up destroying
the earth. They will if we let them. Economists place virtually
no value on our forests, soils, wetlands, rivers, seas, or
coral reefs, until the economic process has so degraded and
destroyed them that they become sufficiently scarce to acquire
an economic value.
Do you then attribute our ecological crisis to our
dogged pursuit of economic development?
Yes. Since childhood most of us have been taught that all
benefits are man-made, the product of scientific, technological
and industrial progress, and made available via the market
system. Thus health is dispensed in hospitals and education
is a commodity that can only be acquired in schools and universities.
Not surprisingly, a country’s wealth is measured by
its per capita Gross National Product (GNP), which provides
a rough measure of its ability to provide such man-made commodities,
a principle faithfully reflected in modern economics. For
economists trained in these ideas, natural benefits –
those provided by the normal workings of biospheric processes,
assuring the stability of our climate, the fertility of our
soil, the replenishment of our water supplies and the integrity
and cohesion of our families and communities – are not
regarded as benefits at all; indeed, our economists attribute
to them no value of any kind. It follows that to be deprived
of these non-benefits cannot constitute a ‘cost’
and the natural systems that provide them can thereby be destroyed
with total impunity.
How does this impact on the quality of human life?
It is increasingly clear that modern economic development
gives rise to conditions that lie outside what ecologists
call our ‘tolerance range’. The examples are legion.
We now eat food grown by unnatural processes, which make use
of a host of chemical substances: hormones, antibiotics, insecticides,
herbicides and fungicides. Our food is then processed in vast
factories, with the result that its molecular and genetic
structure is often totally different from that of the food
we have been adapted to eat during the course of our evolution.
We drink water contaminated with nitrates, heavy metals and
synthetic organic chemicals, including pesticides, which no
commercial sewage works or water purification plants can entirely
remove. We breathe air polluted with lead, carbon monoxide
and nitrogen oxides from car exhausts, sulphur dioxide from
chimney flues, radioactive iodine, caesium
and a host of other radio-nuclides from the flues of nuclear
installations. It is hardly surprising, then, that we now
suffer from a whole range of new diseases, often referred
to as ‘diseases of civilisation’.
Even the millions marching against war and globalisation
seem unable to grasp such ecological home truths. Can we ever
hope to win critical mass support?
If we don’t, we face nothing short of human extinction.
Man evolved in a rich and largely natural environment, but
he also evolved as an integral part of the extended family,
the lineage group and the small community. In other words,
he evolved within a highly structured social environment.
As economic development speeds up, however, the community
and its intermediary associations disintegrate.
What is the alternative you advocate?
An ecological world-view. Where real benefits, and hence real
wealth are derived from the normal functioning of the natural
world and of the extended families and cohesive communities
within which we have lived for perhaps 95 per cent of our
experience on this planet and without which there can be no
stable society. If this is so, then it must follow that our
overriding goal can only be to preserve true societies and
the natural world, come what may. Significantly, this was
very much the goal of early traditional societies who were
imbued with what is often referred to as a chthonic religion
– or the religion of the earth.
You keep returning to India. As a Britisher, you
must have some thoughts about the nation your country enslaved.
I do. I love this country and its earthy heritage. And I remember
Lord Salisbury, who said to England that: “India must
be bled”. We British killed India’s textile industry
and forced you to buy our Lancashire textiles. Then we repeated
this success around the world. My life is now dedicated to
the proposition that latter day colonial powers are prevented
from repeating such crimes, anywhere on earth.
The corporates who champion globalisation hardly
see themselves as criminals. They say they merely want a level
playing field for all players. Is that wrong?
Remember Goliath? He too wanted a level playing field. But
David, on the other hand, wanted places to hide and retreat,
from where he could defend himself with his sling shot. Would
you like to fight Mike Tyson on a level playing field?
Heaven forbid! People either love you or hate you
Teddy. Who really is Edward Goldsmith?
Certainly not the same person I was three decades ago. I have
adapted over the years to a rapidly altered world, as have
all of us. But my basic thesis remains unchanged. Over three
decades ago the obvious fact dawned upon me that the industrial
society in which we live, and that we take to be normal, desirable
and permanent, is in fact aberrant, destructive and necessarily
short-lived, and that rather than further increase our dependence
upon it, we should, on the contrary, reduce such dependence
and set out systematically to phase it out. Not everyone is
comfortable with such articulation. They are the ones who
try and pin labels on me. I have variously been called a “Bolshevik”
(l’Actuel, a French periodical), a “whacko-communist-liberal”
(a viewer of the US television programme ‘C-Span), an
“anarchist” (widespread sources), a “Jacobin”
(Lyndon Larouche), a “Palaeolithic counter-revolutionary”
(widespread sources), an “omnivorous pseudo-ecological
tribalist” (Bob Finch of the Mundi Club) a “hypocrisy
accumulation zone” (same source), a “Gaian-sociobiologist”
(Wolfgang Sachs) a “madman”, (Professor Lewis
Wolpert), and even more recently, so I am told, the “anti-Christ”
(Cardinal Biffi).
That’s a bit extreme… even for one such as you,
who inspires incredibly passionate support… and opposition.
Not really. It gets better. In the past couple of years Eric
Krebbers and others of ‘Fabel van de Illegaal’
have launched heavy, vitriolic assaults at me, dubbing me,
of all things, racist, fascist, neo-nazi, and an “extreme
right-wing ideologue”! This suggests above all that
my writings are difficult to categorise in terms of today’s
conventional classifications, also that my views threaten
and therefore are not popular among many sectors of today’s
industrial society. Needless to say, I reject even more vociferously
the globalisation of this destructive process, which, by its
very nature, can only lead, if it continues for much longer,
to the annihilation of the natural world, and among other
things to the extinction of our species.
How do we even start to tackle the problem?
We start at home and then link up with others to restore ecological
sanity in ever widening circles. It was with this purpose
that I founded The Ecologist. We publish tough issues, at
times strongly attacking some of the main organizations responsible
for the horrible mess the world is in today – organisations
like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF)
and the World Trade Organisation (WTO), and various multinational
corporations. In recent years multinationals have become so
big that in terms of sales many are now bigger than the average
nation state. Thus the sales of the Mitsubishi Corporation
are bigger than the total GNP of Indonesia – a country
with a population of 200 million people. The multinationals,
of course, claim they provide jobs. With the support of governments,
servants and politicians who represent the global interests
more than those of their own people I might add. In reality,
it is the small and medium size companies that provide the
jobs. The combined sales of the world’s top multinationals
are equal to 28 per cent of total world GNP, but they employ
only 18.8 million people, less than one third of one percent
of the world’s population. In the U.S.A. between 1979
and 1989, when large corporations shed four million jobs,
small and medium sized companies created 20 million.
Technocrats in the employ of global corporates claim
they serve the public interest by harnessing science for consumers.
Rubbish. Take the case of Monsanto. It is absolutely huge
and is one of the world’s biggest producers of genetically
engineered products. When we wrote against them they coerced
our printers to incinerate all 14,000 copies of the Ecologist
we had printed in the UK. The only interests they serve are
their own. The same holds true for companies dealing in a
host of products and services from petroleum and nuclear power
to weapons, factory farming and chemicals.
The point is we did not evolve as part of the technosphere
– its proudest creations, such as the motor-car, the
television set and the computer are nice to have but we can
live without them and indeed have done so for perhaps 99 percent
of our tenancy of this planet, but we cannot live without
the products of the biosphere – such as fertile soil,
abundant and clean water and a favourable and stable climate.
Are you saying that science and technology have
no place in human life?
I acknowledge that science and technology can solve impressive
technological problems like going to the moon – but
the real problems we face here on earth today are of a very
different order. They are caused by the disintegration and
breakdown of natural systems like biological organisms, families,
communities, ecosystems, and the ecosphere, or Gaia herself,
i.e. the biosphere together with its geological substrate
and atmospheric environment. Against such problems, science
and technology are largely impotent. What they can do above
all is serve to mask their symptoms, which means prolonging
the agony – for a while at most. There is no scientific
or technological gimmickry that will bring together the members
of a family or of a community that have disintegrated, nor
that can extract from the atmosphere all the greenhouse gases
that are responsible for global warming.
In recent times, climate change seems to be dominating
your personal agenda.
That has been the case for several years now. Because it is
the most serious technological-related disaster of all times,
causing our lives to be increasingly disrupted by the growing
incidence of hurricanes, floods, droughts, and sea-level rises.
We could slow down this process and hope that
the climate will eventually stabilise and leave us with a
habitable world, but only if we take rapid action, and serious
action at that. So far there is little sign of any such action
being taken.
How else are we likely to be affected?
To begin with the ecological changes will wreak havoc with
species and ecosystems. A mega-diversity nation like India
could wind up losing over 30 or 40 per cent of its wild species
within a century. No computer models can possibly predict
the consequences of such trauma on public health, food security
and human longevity.
Modern agriculture is not only highly vulnerable to climate
change; it is also a major cause of climate change due to
its emissions of greenhouse gases and its damaging effects
on soil and freshwater resources. A combination of traditional
agricultural knowledge and techniques, combined with newly
emerging sustainable technologies, may hold the answers we
need and towards this end, India with its strong traditional
agricultural base may just turn out to be the lighthouse the
rest of the world needs to make its switch to sustainable
– largely organic – agricultural practices. But
if such lessons are not implemented at home then climate-induced
soil instability and plant disease could result in the collapse
of this great nation’s food security.
What lies ahead? Hope, or despair?
Hope. The large demonstrations that are now beginning to occur
wherever the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the World Bank,
the IMF, and the Biotech Industry now choose to convene are
symptoms of the growing feeling by the public that there is
a serious gulf between the interests of these monster corporations
and those of humanity and the natural world. In this respect
Seattle with its massive anti-globalisation, anti-WTO protests,
was a watershed in November 1999, and so was Cancun in September
2003 (when warships were called out to contain the peaceful
tidal wave of protests). If the public becomes sufficiently
informed and continues to react as it has been doing these
last few years against the sordid agenda of its political
and industrial leaders, we might indeed be faced with a much
rosier future. |
