Right Livelihood

Social enterprise

Legal and Financial Issues

Shifting the global economy towards sustainability
How the Global Economy Works Today	Why the Global Economy Behaves As It Does	Turning the Global Economy Towards Sustainability

Tracing the Connections

Today, natural and social systems are creaking under the strain imposed upon them by economic forces. Indicators of all kinds – including levels of biodiversity and species extinction, loss of topsoil, water availability, ability of the atmosphere to absorb greenhouse gases, depression, drug abuse, suicide and many others – suggest that the systems we have built are not serving to make either people or the planet happy and healthy. In short, the ways in which we within the global human family are meeting our needs threaten the very support systems on which we depend.

However, given the globalised nature of the systems we have built today, it can often be difficult to trace causal relationships between our behaviours and their impacts. Until relatively recently, within the last century for most people, it was easy to see when we were living beyond the carrying capacity of the places where we live: pollution of the air or waterways, over-grazing and loss of topsoil and trees would have been immediately evident.

Over the last thirty years of so, however, ecological indicators in most parts of the industrialised world have significantly improved – fish are returning to once dead lakes and rivers, air quality is improving in most cities, many reforestation programmes are being implemented. This could lead us to believe that things are actually improving.

The truth, however, is that the economically rich countries have simply exported most of their heavily polluting industries and the worst social and ecological consequences of our economic behaviour are felt far from the view of the world’s consumer class.

Example

By way of example – and this is an example we will return to in this module – let us trace the causal relationship between overconsumption in the economically rich countries of one product, oil palm, and the social and ecological impacts in the poorer countries of the global South.
We read with increasing frequency in our newspapers of mud-slides in Indonesia engulfing villages. ‘What does this have to do with us in the economically rich countries?’ you might ask.

So, let’s trace the causal connections:

increased economic wealth leads directly to an increase in meat consumption and indirectly to an increase in demand for biofuels (in an attempt to reduce greenhouse gases that are generated by economic activity).
demand for palm oil, a key component in both animal feed and biofuels, increases.
palm oil plantations expand, replacing self-sufficient farmers on land they and their families have cultivated for generations in countries like Indonesia.
some of the displaced small farmers move to city slums, others move up the hillsides where they clear trees to create new farm land.
since the land on the hillsides is not suitable for farming, within a few years it has lost its fertility and is abandoned
the cutting down of the trees affects local weather patterns so that it rains less frequently, but when it does, it falls in torrents.
there are no longer any tree roots to hold the soil, so when the rain pours, it carries the mud down the hillsides, deluging villages.

The impact of ethanol

Meat products
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