> http://www.theage.com.au/text/articles/2006/02/05/1139074104036.html
>
> Consuming the future
>
> Melbourne Age
> February 6 2006
>
> Our consumerist culture is unsustainable and the world must
> find alternative ways, says Robert Newman.
>
---
> Capitalism is not sustainable by its very nature. It is
> predicated on infinitely expanding markets, faster
> consumption and bigger production in a finite planet. And yet
> this ideological model remains the central organising
> principle of our lives, and as long as it continues to be so
> it will automatically undo (with its invisible
> hand) every single green initiative anybody cares to come up with.
Not the first one, sez Jared Diamond in his book _Collapse_ and probably not the last one. However, what seems unique about c. is that unlike its romanticized pre-modern predecessors, it has created the technical capacity of effectively dealing with climate changes. This conclusion may be at odds with Diamond's thesis that all the societies that collapsed did have the capacity to survive the collapse, but they simply did not utilize that capacity for cultural reasons.
However, I believe that Diamond's thesis does not take into account path dependency which is more than just unwillingness to break up with the established ways - it is also the tremendous economic cost of such a breakup. One of the Diamond's "cases" - the Norse of Iceland - went extinct, the argument goes, because they stuck to their unsustainable pastoralist-agriculturalist model for cultural reasons, instead of adopting the Inuit hunting and fishing model. Undoubtedly, culture must have been a factor, but certainly not the most important one if you consider the cost of transition from one model to another, and the resources that were required to cover those costs, which the barely surviving Norse simply did not have.
Here are some of these transition costs: acquiring the sea hunting technology esp. water-proof umiaks and adopting it to the physiological features of the Norse (which were different from those of the Inuit), learning the sea hunting skills, inevitable competition with the Inuit, learning the proper food preservation methods (unlike pastoralist that can slaughter animals when they are ready to consume them, hunters, especially seasonal hunters must preserve the meat for longer time periods). While none of these transition costs were insurmountable, overcoming them required a rather long "learning curve," several years at least. During those transition years, the Norse would have to for the most part abandon the model which hitherto had been the basis of their subsistence and kept practicing new skills which were insufficient to generate enough resources to sustain their society. It is therefore clear that they would have to have some surplus that would allow them to survive during the transition period. However, they did not have such surplus because their own production was insufficient to generate it, and they did not have the technology to import that surplus from somewhere else.
Now contrast that with capitalism that produces enough surplus to carry the entire society through a transition period and adequate technology not just to import goods from abroad in case of need, but that can be readily implemented to create new models of land are resource use, transportation, energy extraction and use, waste disposal, etc. So while the current patterns of consumption, especially in the US, are certainly not sustainable, the capitalist society has enough resources and know-how to effectively change those patterns with relative ease (i.e. it can easily cover the costs of transition). If they do not do it, it is a matter of political choice rather than insufficient resources. For that reason alone, my counsel is to stick with capitalism and forget about utopian or third-world alternatives, because most such alternatives (with the exception of China and India) simply do not produce enough. Changing policies of capitalist states is much easier than making up for production deficits of the utopian or third-world models.
Wojtek