Roy Morrison

Roy Morrison sustainability@snhu.edu

P.O. Box 201 603-496-4260

Warner, NH 03278 1-888-436-7176 (fax)

5430 words

Building an Ecological Civilization

Roy Morrison

Building an ecological civilization, in principle, is simple.

First, economic growth must mean ecological improvement, not ecological destruction. This is a practical working definition for sustainability. The aim is long-term ecological restoration. A sustainable civilization is built on an ensemble of actions that keep human activity well within the so-called ecological caring capacity of our world locally and globally.

Second, is the building and co-evolution of an ecological democracy in all its forms. This is essential not just for survival, but for a durable peace and prosperity. Ecological democracy is the social context and structure for sustainability.

The details of an ecological turn, of course, are complex. But, the good news is that building an ecological civilization can be part of the every day practice of our lives in democratic and market-based social systems. The fundamental challenge is not technical, but social, political, and economic. The central task for people is building a vital and durable ecological democracy.

At issue is what types of markets and market rules, what political forms and democratic norms, what laws and regulations, if any, do we need in order for us to do both good and well?

This is fortunate. If our future prosperity and ecological survival depended on abolishing democracy and the market, experience suggests we would quickly create some species of unsustainable tyranny.

Instead, we can use the tools at hand, democracy and markets, appropriately employed to move from a self-destructive, industrial present to a peaceful, just and sustainable ecological future. The complete transformation from industrial to ecological civilization will be an historic project, the work of 150 years or more. Fortunately, the self-destructive reality of industrial civilization has created not just the necessity for an ecological turn, but the conditions that will facilitate fundamental change.

Global Dynamics

An ecological turn will be the consequence of the expression of a complex of global dynamics and choices that will affect the industrial system state and move it toward ecological ends.

These include:

· The global spread and pursuit of democracy and democratic forms;

· The powerful inhibitions of democracies from waging war against other democracies;

· The expansion of democratic forms from the 19^th and 20^th century nation-state to continental unions of diverse nations, while weakening the military and authoritarian prerogatives of states.

· The nation , not as imagined precursor and raison d'etre of the state, but the nation as a multicultural community based on inclusion, not exclusion and a balance of rights and responsibilities.[i]

· The emergence of sustainability as profitable practice even under current industrial market rules and conditions[ii];

· The development of a broad range of efficiency, renewable energy technologies, and financial forms that will replace self-destructive industrial poison power.[iii]

· The evolution and ubiquitous spread of global computer mediated information exchange, communication, and trade networks.

· The growth of information as the new economic base and high profit/surplus center;

· The global growth of self-managing and cooperative networks and socially responsible, community and cooperative capital

· The dematerialization of production and consumption that transforms the ecological impact of economic growth. Buying software, for example, from a renewable energy powered web, changes the relationship between economic growth and ecological degradation.

A Healing Response to Industrial Excess

In broad compass, these intertwined dynamics reflect two basic social forces: a healing response to excess, and an increase in social complexity in response to social conundrums.

First, these dynamics represent countervailing and potentially healing responses to the excesses of industrial civilization. This is the wellspring of creative change and surprising reversals. A war system can give rise to a peace system. A slave empire can lead to the growth of freedom. Markets following paths toward self-destruction can become venues for sustainability. Can, of course, does not mean will, but the potential for healing change in response to excess exists.

21^st century market systems will be driven by unfolding ecological catastrophe to embrace reality, instead of denying it. New market rules and mechanisms are emerging, by fits and starts, and need to systematically include the real costs of pollution and ecological damage in prices. A decrease in pollution will mean an increase in the rate of profit (that is, an increase in useful and sustainable surplus). An increase in pollution will represent a decrease in the rate of profit (and a decrease in the useful surplus). Smart business and smart shopping, improving the bottom line and the family budget must mean doing both good and well.

Our hearts tell us what we should do. Market prices tell us what we will do. This is true whether these markets are characterized as capitalist, cooperative, market-socialist, or some amalgam of the three. Sustainable prosperity will require a convergence upon market rules and mechanisms that get the prices right and democratic structures to adopt, enforce and maintain these structures and resolve the inevitable conflicts and problems that must arise between conflicting interests.

Industrial business as usual, under whatever label, is the path toward self-destruction but also generation of healing responses. The sad history of really existing capitalist and socialist industrialism, including European social democracy and the emerging Chinese capitalist-socialist hybrid, unfortunately makes clear the self-destructive and unsustainable trajectories of all industrial systems predicated upon the maximization of production and consumption, profit and surplus.

The collapse of Soviet communism gave rise to a short-lived period capitalist “end of history” self-congratulation, proclaimed by Francis Fukuyama of the U.S. State Department. This faded more rapidly than expected with the rise of the neo-cons who believed that they could discard the realist limits placed upon the exercise of power to moderate its environmental and military consequences. The old fashioned foreign policy realists of the Baker—Brishinski mold were no longer relevant. The George W. Bush doctrine was that an exercise of U.S. imperial force would accelerate the process of capitalist democratization, and that traditional environmental limits upon maximization represented an unaffordable and unnecessary fetter upon the wisdom and triumph of unrestrained markets. The dream faded in the resource wars in the Iraq and Afghanistan deserts and with the manifestation of a rapidly gathering global ecological catastrophe.

Building an ecological civilization and moving off the path of self-destruction will lead us toward building new democratic structures; adopting and enforcing new ecological market rules; developing new sustainable cooperative networks and financial structures; taking advantage of a shifting welter of global opportunities for communication, relationships, and self-management. There will be many paths to take us from where we are to where we need to and want to be.

For example, it is now becoming possible for large cooperatives of small farmers to gain credit for affordable purchase of fertilizers from lenders, the loan guaranteed, not by the credit of individual farmer, but by through the use of a financial derivative, a weather-linked drought bond that would pay buyers on the basis of objective weather data. Farmers and lenders would both be protected from weather related crop failure.

The bond would be bought by the lender, for example, a development bank, such as the Grameen Bank, to hedge and thereby reduce their investment risk of loans to farmers. The bond would make it possible to provide ongoing support for cooperatives of small farmers. In 2007, Earth Island Institute at Columbia University and the reinsurer Swiss Re used a rainfall index contract for the Sauri Millennium Village in western Kenya.[iv]

An Increase in Social Complexity

Second, the complex of transformative global dynamics, in addition to a healing response to industrial excess, reflect an increase in social complexity in response to problems that resist solutions under current arrangements. For example, the growth of democratic continental unions of nations represents a necessary response to the war making proclivities of the industrial nation-state and its inadequacies in coping with global scale problems that are a consequence of ecological industrial pillage and injustice. The diverse forces leading us toward the global collapse of an industrial nation-state war system will help facilitate building a sustainable global democratic peace system. There are, of course, other possible, and far less desirable, resolutions to the problem.

An increase in complexity is reflected in terms of both local and global structures.

An ecological increase in complexity means more democracy, more networks, more relationships, more communication, and more local integrity. An ecological increase in complexity means elaboration of networks and not the strengthening of hierarchical order, but the building of an ecological democracy. It means more sustainable actions and interactions, more exchange, more self-management, more local empowerment and subsidiarity.

Increasing ecological complexity means the rise of co-evolving and self-organizing networks, of shifting and sometimes virtual forms of order and organization, and the decline of hierarchy and hierarchical order. This is what a sustainable market and an ecological democracy will support and reward.

Information flow through networks is the instrument variously of communication, understanding, democratic decision making, implementation, and calls to action, education, love, exchange, pollutionless production and profit, of economic growth meaning ecological improvement, not ecological damage, of implementation of an ecological tax system, a negative income tax, and provision for investment in sustainability.

To oversimplify--If the water wheel and grinding stone gave us feudalism, the cotton gin plantation slavery, and the steam engine industrial capitalism, then the computer and World Wide Web will potentiate the development of a sustainable ecological civilization. While in retrospect, from the standpoint of 2140, an ecological turn may appear to have been inevitable, in reality, a civilization rises as a result of a complex amalgam of circumstance and choice.

What seems to have been inevitable is but one possibility. What's at work in an ecological turn is neither economic nor technological determinism, but the individual and social choices we make in response to the circumstances at hand. The computer, for example, can facilitate an entire ensemble of useful material, economic, social, and political forms including decoupling of production form pollution, the maximization of operational efficiency, the minimization of waste, the homeostatic control of complex systems, economic growth through fair trade in information, virtual as opposed to physical commuting, the operation of dynamic global communication webs, informational transparency, endless educational opportunities, the empowerment of decentralized democratic forms, and new opportunities for citizen participation and direct democracy.

But what the computer can help us do, does not mean this is what the computer will do. The computer can be the instrument of totalitarian surveillance and oppression, tool for the efficient production of more toxic products, the design of horrendous new weapons, and guide for global war fighting.

The twin great social forces, a healing response to excess, and a helpful increasing complexity are at work in response to the self-evident conduct of industrial business as usual. While, if unchanged, the path we are on leads downward, divergent pathways toward an ecological civilization are emerging as a consequence.

I am not attempting to promulgate a new science of self-serving inevitabilities. A healing response to excess in the 21^st century in spirit turns us more toward Plato and Aristotle than Hegel and Marx. An increase in complexity inclines us more to the nuanced localism of an Aldo Leopold and a Murray Bookchin than to the ubiquitous empire builders and globalizers. This is a call for creative action from below, from where we are, to build an ecological democracy.

Freedom and Community

An ecological civilization, fully realized, will rest upon a global kaleidoscope of shared and varied lifeways and forms. At bottom, ecological civilization will reflect the embrace and practice of both freedom and community. Rather than competing antipodes, freedom and community will come to be understood as interdependent, and the equilibrating dynamic of the ecological way. Without freedom, community will come to mean tyranny. Without community, freedom becomes unrestrained license.

Maintaining the dynamic balance between freedom and community is the job of 21^st century democracy and the practice of individual and community self-management. Ecological order is imposed in neither the biological nor social sphere. It is the product of the dynamic interaction between the one and the many. Vital ecological systems may be stable and sustainable, but they are not static. They are the consequence of evolving webs of interaction where the condition of the whole is a result of equilibrating feedback and co-determination and co-evolution among its myriad constituents.

The current industrial system endangers both the community and individuals by permitting unsustainable pollution, depletion and ecological destruction not properly constrained by law, regulation, or the market price system in the interest of the few. It is a pollution system. It is a war system. It is an unjust system enriching and privileging the few at the expense of the many.

In the coming century-and-a-half there will emerge a startling convergence between desire and reality, between what we want and what we do. This is the dynamic of sustainability, of freedom and community, in action, the dynamic balance between the interests of the one and of the many.

This second great transformation, from an industrial to an ecological civilization, will not be a case of miraculous human improvement or a return to a past Golden Age. Rather prosaically, and that's the good news, necessity, that is, history and self-interest is on our side. By history, I mean this constellation of forces and global dynamics that are establishing the basis for building an ecological civilization, and the emerging practice of sustainability as economic, social, political, and philosophical engine of change.

An ecological world as it emerges may likely be characterized by:

· A sustainable market and market rules;

· Dematerialized production and trade in information;

· A Negative Income Tax (NET) or Basic Income Grant (BIG);

· A universe of small economic entities featuring dynamic shifting alliances and networks of cooperatives and community based businesses

· A global system of continental unions of democratic nations. Nations become shifting, self-defined, and over-lapping entities defined by propinquity and communication, not by borders;

· Unions of nations representing the gradual abandonment of state sanctions and the hollowing out of state action and the growth of community and cooperative self-management and of local direct democratic forms. The concerns of Unions will be on maintenance of basic ecological market rules, ecological principles, and the charter of universal individual rights in support of sustainable freedom and community.

While popularly, the 21^st and 22^nd century will be China's time as industrial giant, not an era of the emergence and acceleration of an ecological turn. But in fact, China's economic advantage rests upon a self-destructive and unsustainable base of massive dirty coal use, toxic air and water pollution, damming of rivers and draining of aquifers, loss of crop land and desertification. This all is supported by a denial of worker rights and democracy, the suppression of Tibetan and Muslim minorities, and a culture of corruption.

The Chinese model is a startling amalgam of the most effective growth at any cost measures drawn from the worst of capitalist and totalitarian socialist industrial practice. Employing the productive forces at hand at the end of the 20^th century, China has been able to accomplish in a few decades its rise to global industrial dominance. But this has come at an unsustainable price – costs not yet fully borne by Chinese industry happily polluting, depleting and ecologically damaging for free.

These, of course, are not practices particular to China. And Chinese practice can certainly be changed toward the sustainable. China may become a green leader. And I believe that the in future the popular slogan will be The East is Green. But that must involve an effort of a magnitude similar to, or even greater than, China’s rise to industrial leader.

Conditions of horrendous abuse are found to a greater or lesser extent throughout the industrialized world. I remember, for instance, my first trip through attractively named Sparrow Point outside of Baltimore with its collection of belching steel mills (now mostly shut), toxic lagoons, and signs on the road cautioning drivers of smoke.

All of industrialism's costs will be paid. The costs are global. They will be borne to a greater or lesser extent by all, by the poor and the rich, by the North and the South. There will be a distribution of suffering. It will not be equal. But all will suffer.

The Savings and Investment Imperative

It certainly not enough to claim that history is on the side of ecological transformation. The ecological turn, in practice, will require trillions of dollars in sustainable investment. How will these funds be raised? How will democratic, sustainable investment decisions be made? How will the market price system send proper signals to reward sustainability?

These are not merely abstract questions to be addressed in the future. In fact, today, instead of being at the end of the pipeline paying ever rising prices for poison power, we can use our money spent on energy purchases to help build and benefit from the sustainable renewable energy infrastructure. And what is needed to make this happen is the application for ecological and democratic ends of new organizational and financial tools in response to the increasing prices and unsustainable consequences of industrial business as usual.

For instance, one recent morning, as an energy consultant, I received a call from a banker. He was working on financing a relatively small wind project (10 megawatt capacity from 5 large turbines) for a local developer. The banker was interested in learning about renewable energy hedges, financial agreements between energy users and energy developers, that I am helping develop.

A wind farm pays no fuel costs. Energy market prices for electricity and heat vary according to the price of fossil fuels. As the price of natural gas rises and falls so does prices of electricity and heat. But since renewable energy has no fuel costs it can offer reasonable fixed energy prices and makes possible the innovative use of a renewable energy financial swap that benefits energy users, energy developers, the community and the environment as the renewable energy infrastructure is built.

Using a renewable energy hedge, an energy user can change electricity and natural gas from a variable to a long-term and affordable fixed cost. The renewable energy developer reduces their financing costs. Agreements based on the energy expenses of energy users become the basis for financing the building of the renewable energy future.

The renewable energy hedge is not a speculation. It is the application of a contract for differences (CFD) a venerable financial risk reduction mechanism used by both the producers and users of a commodity. The user buys a commodity at a reasonable long-term cost; the producer receives a reasonable long-term income stream. For the user, the CFD is roughly similar to a sophisticated kind of the familiar heating oil pre-buy. The difference is that a CFD is long-term and requires that the user pays no money up front in order to obtain net fixed yearly energy costs.

In a renewable energy hedge, the user and the developer agree upon a strike price, for example, 7 cents per kilowatt hour of electricity, for a quantity of energy needed by the user. For example, a town using 250,000 kilowatt hours a month can hedge the total output of a one megawatt wind turbine that averages 250,000 kilowatt hours per month production. The producer sells the renewable energy into the local hourly spot market where it is located at the hourly spot price. This hourly price varies depending on the price of fossil fuel and the level of local electric demand.

Each month the hedge settles. If the average price for energy the producer receives in a month is above the strike price, the producer sends the difference to the user. If the amount is below the strike price, the user sends the difference to the producer. If energy prices soar the user maintains a constant net annual expense. If energy prices plunge, the producer maintains a constant net annual income.

The CFD financial swap assures the energy user they will pay a long-term (e.g. fifteen years) affordable net fixed price for an agreed upon quantity of energy. The CFD assures the producer they will earn a reasonable long term fixed income stream for their commodity.

The renewable hedge has additional advantages as a financial swap, not an energy purchase. It is an agreement that can be made between producers and users who are far away from one another. The hedge works as long as energy prices in both markets rise and fall along with the price of natural gas. Thus hedges could be negotiated between, a wind coop in Denmark and a town in New England. [v]

Renewable energy hedges are an early step along the sustainable road where cooperative and community based and controlled capital and ownership emerges as economic norm and where market price signals make polluting, depleting, and ecologically damaging goods and services more expensive. Remember, the electric utility system is the largest capital agglomeration and significant source of pollution locally and globally. Renewable energy hedges are an emergent example representing the potential for building a sustainable and democratically financed and controlled smart electricity grid. This is a network based on renewable and distributed generation and cogeneration, real time computer mediated control for high efficiency and minimal ecological damage.

In a smart electric network system, individuals are both buyers of electricity from the network and sellers of electricity into the network from their renewable generation and cogeneration. Meanwhile, the net cost of purchased energy is controlled by financial hedge agreements of various kinds made by users with renewable energy developers. These agreements can be used by individuals of all income levels, financed through credit union, and back stopped by the user stream of savings. These agreements not only control user costs, but also provide equity interest for individuals, as well as reducing and offsetting emissions.

That the electric utility system can be transformed to one characterized by broadly democratic forms of finance and ownership in sustainable technologies is no small step-- supported by proper market rules, price signals and relevant financial instruments.

Unsustainable Investment

Sustainable investment can also be understood in contrast to what it is not, the conduct of industrial business as usual, for example, the extraction of heavy oil from Alberta tar sands.

In response to the growing global demand for oil and oil prices, many billions are being invested by banks and government to produce oil at great expense and negative ecological consequence by mining the vast deposits of oil tar sands (in Alberta and Venezuela) and heating them with copious amounts of natural gas to ultimately extract several million barrels of oil a day. From Alberta, the so-called heavy oil will be sent by pipeline for sale to China and Japan or to the United States. This is all being done in the context of a rapidly depleting global supply, ferocious commercial competition and resource wars for control of oil, and gathering fossil fuel driven global climate catastrophe.

The consequences of oil extraction from tar sands will, of course, worsen the ecological situation at enormous expense. Even in terms of the logic of oil supply, the heavy oil sacrifice will fail to reverse the dwindling supply of rapidly depleting oil reserves. Oil sands extraction is potentially “profitable” for investors. Success is predicated on long-term oil prices remaining high, and costs for ecological pillage from use of huge amounts of natural gas to heat tar and the consequences of mining and sludge disposal remain externalized i.e. socialized and paid by others, and not have be borne immediately by the producers. Investment can be profitable, only if costs are shifted and paid by those poisoned downwind, or spread over the planet through climate change, or passed off to future generations.

The billions to be spent to obtain heavy oil and the trillions to be squandered on resource wars in Iraq and Afghanistan represent desperate attempts of industrial overlords to maintain the empire of oil and industrial business as usual.

The alternative is to employ and adapt the democratic and market means available to serve sustainable ecological ends. The necessity, to meet the enormous challenges at hand, is to build the road as we travel, as the Mondragon cooperators understood. [vi] We face enormous technological challenges in getting from here, from an afflicted industrial present, to there, an ecological future. But our problem is not primarily technical, it is democratic. That is, we need to make an ongoing series of decisions in order to move successfully from here to there.

We should keep in mind that the technical problems created by industrialism cannot simply be reduced to a question of too much carbon being sent into atmosphere. Rather, the conduct of industrial civilization is self-destructive and unsustainable. Carbon and climate change, as Jared Diamond explicated in his book Collapse is but one of these threats. Industrial civilization is in the process of stopping itself. We cannot afford not to attempt to intervene. There will be no soft landing in a world magically returned to self-sufficient eco villages and tree lined city neighborhoods after the storm has past. The likelihood, without vigorous democratic intervention, is collapse and a turn to barbarism. We need more than a green Robert Moses to be set to work to erect the renewable resource and high efficiency infrastructure. Industrial civilization and its conduct as a whole is the problem that must be addressed through democratic means.

There are many good ideas that can become the basis for effective action. What's needed is not orders from above, but a rising and revitalization of democracy from below. Some of the mechanisms and policies to help facilitate building an ecological civilization will be discussed below. These represent concrete expressions of a revitalized political infrastructure that can be put to use by an insistent democracy rising.

Tools for Change

I want to discuss three mechanisms, an ecological tax plan, a negative income tax, and a National Trust for investment in sustainability that can help move democratic market based societies toward an ecological future. These are not magic wands. But they are important tools. My book, Markets, Democracy & Survival (forthcoming 2007) discusses these in detail.

The principle is clear if we want to make economic growth mean ecological improvement, not ecological destruction. More pollution must mean a decrease in the rate of profit. Less pollution must mean increasing profits. Polluting goods will lose market share. Non-polluting goods will gain market share.

The market means are at hand, if we assert ourselves democratically, to lead to sustainability and prosperity. We need to tax consumption, not income. Pay taxes on whatever we buy or use. More pollution, more tax. Lower pollution, less tax. Ecological consumption taxes, properly applied, can enlist market forces and the price system in the cause of ecological sustainability.

An average 18% ecological value added tax, or E-VAT, can replace all current U.S. government taxes on income, and get the prices right by raising taxes on more polluting goods and services. The more polluting, the higher the E-VAT tax rate, and the lower the rate of profit.

The simple relationship between less pollution and higher profit will lead in short order to a fundamental transformation in the way we do business and make investment and consumption decisions. If polluting goods and services cost more, we just need to be price conscious shoppers and businesspeople. Our ethics and our pocketbooks will be once more aligned.

The principle is simple. Make the E-VAT rate on all goods and services increase with the amount of pollution, depletion, or ecological damage. That’s an accessible path to ecological sustainability and peace, instead of climate change and resource wars for oil, water, and fertile high ground.

We can phase in the E-VAT over ten years as we phase out income taxes. The E-VAT is simple for consumers. You pay a sales tax at the point of purchase. You file no tax forms. You avoid taxes by buying less polluting goods or services with lower tax rates indicated by color codes.

And the E-VAT is simple and largely self-enforcing for businesses. Businesses file only a simple form reporting the tax you collected from your sales and taking credit for the tax you paid your suppliers. You send the difference between what you collected and what you paid to the government. This credit for invoices system means that the value sellers add to their product is only taxed once. The E-VAT could be based, first, on average amounts of pollution, depletion, and ecological damage by S.I.C. code (Standard Industrial Classification) with less polluting items applying for reductions.

The E-VAT is consistent with WTO rules that permit taxes on imports with exemptions for exports. If the U.S. adopted an E-VAT, it would make exporters from China to Germany change their practices.

The E-Vat tax base is final sales to domestic purchasers, more than $13 trillion a year. An 18% average E-VAT, with allowances for collection and non-compliance, could replace all personal, corporate, and payroll taxes.

The E-VAT as a tax on all consumption, not simply on pollution, is positively reinforcing. As the market responds to E-VAT rates, highest polluting items would lose market share. To maintain revenues, the tax on moderate polluting items would rise. Over time, this would mean the E-VAT would tend toward a flat tax on most items that were sustainable in impact with high taxes indeed on the few polluting outliers.

The regressive nature of the E-VAT can easily be remedied by a targeted negative income tax. An additional $64.5 billion for a negative income tax would keep federal tax rates flat for the 40% of U.S, households with the lowest income. And we can fund an effective National Trust for investment in community and sustainability by saving and investing $50 billion dollars a year in taxes raised by the E-VAT. The National Trust can grow to be a large and democratically controlled pool of community capital helping build the infrastructure for the ecological turn.

Together these tools, in the terms of Andre Gorz, represent radical reforms that help potentiate sustainable practices, the growth of ecological democracy, and an ecological turn.

Conclusion

Building an ecological civilization is a matter of necessity and choice. It’s an opportunity to apply our best efforts in the cause of our families, our futures and a sustainable prosperity for all.

An ecologically sustainable world of peace and justice, democracy, self-management, freedom and community will be a matter of hard work, not just heart felt wishes. It is hard work that each of us in our own ways can choose to undertake and become a participant in the great ecological transformation. Each of us can choose to make our own contribution to this effort. When taken together, the work of millions will come to mean that we will all share a common identity as world healer.

L’chaim.

Roy Morrison is Director of the Office for Sustainability at Southern New Hampshire University. His latest book is Markets, Democracy & Survival (forthcoming 2007) available for download now at www.RMAenergy.net.