When you base your love on credit and your loving days are done,
the cheques you signed with love and kisses later come back signed insufficient funds
- Can you get to that, Funkadelic
What reason can I possibly have for
introducing this post with some 70s funk? To me, the song’s lyrics make the
point that the accumulation of debt, which is the equivalent to the erosion of
wealth, has implications. Although the concept of ‘wealth’ is often viewed from
a solely monetary perspective (as the assets that an individual owns such as
savings and housing), some economists argue that this narrow definition needs
to be extended to include the natural and social forms of wealth that sustain
human wellbeing (such as environmental processes and education). This concept
of ‘comprehensive wealth’ means that ‘environmental debt’ can be defined as
actions that reduce the ability of the natural environment to sustain human wellbeing,
which brings us back to Funkadelic’s lyrics:
Well, I read an old quotation in a book just yesterday ,Said "Gonna reap just what you sow, The debts you make you have to pay."
The collapse of ancient civilisations in
southern Mesopotamia exemplifies the catastrophic impacts that the accumulation
of excessive ‘environmental debt’ can have on human societies. Irrigated
agriculture was essential to the development of early Sumerian societies around
5300 BC as it enabled high crop yields that were able to sustain sedentary,
urban populations (Leick 2003). Between 2350 and 1700 BC, however, crop yields
declined considerably owing to an increase in salinity that impeded the
cultivation of wheat and, although populations were able to adapt by shifting
to the more salt-tolerant crop of barley, yields continued to remain below 50%
of previous levels (Chew 2001). Thompson (2004) argues that these dramatic
declines in food production drove depopulation in Southern Mesopotamia causing
a northward shift in regional power that ended the dominance of Southern
civilisations.
The extent to which human activities caused
this disastrous increase in salinity is debated. Jacobsen and Adams (1958) suggest
that population pressures necessitated the construction of large irrigation
channels resulting in progressive salinisation as over-irrigation caused ground
water levels to rise. An alternative explanation that emphasises the impact of
climatic change is presented by Issar (1995), who argues that variations in
climate diminished the flow of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, reducing the
amounts of water available to flush salts from irrigated land. I believe that
the most adequate explanation of south Mesopotamian decline, however, is a
synthesis of these alternative hypotheses as articulated by Chew (2001) who
states that climatological changes undermined an agricultural system that had
been pushed to it’s ecological limits as a result of intense cultivation
practices.
The critical point here is that the
Mesopotamian populations did not recognise that their intensive farming practices
were reducing environmental resilience and thereby undermining the capacity of
the natural environment to sustain their civilisation. In other words, they
were running up environmental debt with inadequate consideration of the
consequences.
So what can be done to avoid a repeat of
the Mesopotamian experience?
It is inevitable that the efforts needed to
ensure contemporary human civilisation is not undermining the natural wealth
upon which it depends are numerous and diverse. In order to increase the
effectiveness of such efforts, and discourage actions with deleterious
environmental effects, it is vital that methods of monitoring and quantifying
natural wealth are developed. While this may seem like blue-skies thinking,
several governments – including the UK Treasury – are currently attempting to
incorporate environmental variables into the national accounting frameworks
that are the basis of standard economic indicators such as GDP. If you can get
past the crippling dullness of the video below (it is produced by the Office
for National Statistics after all), it provides a pretty good explanation of
what’s being done in the UK.
By providing an objective environmental monitoring framework with which politicians could be held to account these methodological developments could promote a green transition by increasing political motives to preserve – and perhaps even enhance – environmental wealth. However, despite the potential of environmental accounting, I’m pretty skeptical that it will actually achieve anything. To date, very few environmental variables have been considered and negligible public awareness of the concept means it is unlikely to displace GDP as the raison d'être of politicians. In the face of current political priorities I fear that valuable lessons, both from funk and from the past, are going to continue to be ignored and that the accumulation of environmental debt will continue until the consequences start to manifest themselves in pretty severe ways.
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