现代大学英语精读4第八课课文Ec...

现代大学英语精读4第八课课文Ec...
Charles Darwin was a rigorous, meticulous scientist. He spent nearly 20 years honing his analysis and polishing his prose before publishing his groundbreaking work, On the Origin of Species, in November 1859.
Darwin’s slim volume was what we would call a “game changer,” a revolutionary work that fundamentally altered the way human beings see themselves and the natural world. Today most of us are familiar with his theo ry of “natural selection”—the foundation of modem evolutionary biology. But 150 years ago, Darwin was sailing into choppy waters. The Church of England had set rigid boundaries, and his thesis was clearly a challenge to the orthodox view that humans were a separate, unique part of God’s creation and that all life was divinely created and unchan geable.
The establishment of the time mocked him. There was intense public debate. But Darwin was unflinching. Today his core idea that all animals and plants evolve and adapt through natural selection is the bedrock of modern life sciences. He opened the door to a new world—a door which religious fundamentalists and “intelligent design” proponents are still trying to close.
Darwin’s long battle has disturbing echoes today. We, too, are trapped in the same sort of false illusion that stymied critical thought before his radical breakthrough, except that the myth that envelops us is more dangerous and even more deeply rooted.
Our great sustaining myth is economic growth: faith that the economy can grow forever, that there are no limits to the wealth we can create from Earth’s natural resources. Growth, measured
by an increasing Gross Domestic Product (GDP), is what drives government policy worldwide.
The equation has been drummed into us for so long that it’s received wisdom. Growth equals prosperity and job s. Growth equals progress.
Yet this is a relatively recent turn of events. Using the GDP as a tool to measure growth has only been around since the late 1940s when the UN System of National Accounts was developed. For most of human history, economic growth was a mere blip. Only the last eight generations of humans have experienced consistent growth. As the father of green economics, Herman Daly, points out: “Historicall y, steady state is the normal condition; growth is an aberration.” By “steady state,” Daly means an economy with a constant population and “the lowest feasible flows of matter and energy from the first stage of production to the last stage of consumption.”
The latest global economic slump underlines our reliance on growth. What happens when the economy stumbles? Financial markets crash, property values plummet, bankruptcies pile up, unemployment soars, and social pathologies multiply. Thus the resurgence of Keynesian economics. Prime the pump with billions in government funds. Pray that tax breaks and fiscal stimulus will boost investment, production, and jobs.
Yet the world already produces far too much stuff, a lot of it unnecessary and much of it useless. We go on churning out mountains of consumer goods because it’s good for growth. As long as the economy keeps growing, things will be okay. Growth keeps people employed, investment profitable, and the endless cycle of production and consumption spinning. Increases in productivity and the restless search for profits drive the process.
Endless accumulation and expansion is the core of capitalism.
Consider this: the world economy grew more than seven-fold from 1950 to 2000. It’s projected to do the same again by 2050. At current rates of growth (before the recent global meltdown), the economy was doubling every 15 years, a breathtaking number when you consider that it took all of human history to reach the $6 trillion world economy of 1950. As the US writers Fr ed Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster note: “No-growth capitalism is an oxymoron: when growth ceases, the system is in a state of crisis.” The upshot is that the natural environment, on which human life and the human economy depend, is sidelined—“not as a pla ce with inherent boundaries within which human beings must live together with Eart h’s other species, but as a realm to be exploited in a process of growing economic expansion.”
The uncomfortable and inconvenient truth is that the physical resources of the biosphere are finite. We’re not approaching the ecological limits to growth; we’r e well past them. And in the process we are fouling the planet with our wastes and threatening the natural systems on which humanity and all other species depend.
The hard statistics of ecological decline could fill a library. We’re chewing through massiv e quantities of both renewable and non-renewable resources at a breakneck speed.
In 2005, the UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a collaborative work of more than 10,000 scientists, found that 60% of “ecosystem services”—things like climate regulation, the water cycle, pollination, global fisheries, natural waste treatment—were being degraded or used unsustainably. “Human activity is putting such a heavy strain on Earth’s
na tural functions,” the report warned, “that the ability of the planet’s ecosystems to sustain human endeavor can no longer be taken for granted.”
The new familiar Ecological Footprint model supports this conclusion. It’s a way of asking how much we’re extra cting from the planet to live the way we do. Conventional economics tends to see the environment as a subset of the economy. The footprint approach does the reverse, comparing humanity’s ecological impact—resources consumed and waste produced—with the amount of productive land and water available to supply key ecosystem services. It deals in averages so the rich/poor divide is blurred. But the message is clear. It takes about 1.8 hectares to sustain the average person on Earth. Those of us in the rich world are way above the average: Canadians each use about eight hectares, and Americans use 10, more than five times the average.
In 1961, human beings used about half of Earth’s biocapacity; by 2006 we were using 44% more than is available. Mathis Wackemagel, one of the founders of the ecological footprint system, says we will need the equivalent of two Earths by the late 2030s to keep up with our demands. Ecologists call this phenomenon “overshoot.” It’s a temporary state that becomes increasingly untenable as stocks of resources are depleted.
Wackernagel again says: “Since the 1980s, we’ve been drawing down the biosphere’s principal rather than living off its annual interest. To support our consumption, we have been liquidating resource stocks and allowing carbon dioxide to accumulate in the atmosphere.”
Oil is the main culprit. The burning of fossil fuels, especially
petroleum, powers the global economy. Oil is an extraordinary feat of concentrated energy: three large teaspoons of crude contain about the same amount of energy as eight hours of human manual labor. Geologist Colin J. Camp bell hit the nail on the head: “It’s as if each one of us had a team of slaves working for us for next to nothing.”
Napoleon said that an army marches on its stomach; our mod ern globalized economy marches on oil. But it’s a Faustian bargain. The costs now exceed the benefits. Take the climate system, a key “natural service” threatened by human-made greenhouse gas emissions, mostly CO2, the main by-product from the combustion of fossil fuels. The more oil and coal we bum, the more CO2 is pumped into the atmosphere and the more we tip the balance.
Leading climate scientists say a target of 350 parts per million (ppm) of CO2 might avoid dangerous climate change. We’re currently at 390 ppm and projected to hit 650 ppm by the end of this century. This translate s into an average increase in global temperature of about 4°C. If this projection plays out, we’re in big trouble. Large parts of Africa, China, India, and Latin America would become desert. Have you heard the term “environmental refugees”? Keep it in mind, because you’re going to be hearing it a lot more in the years ahead.
Even on its own terms, growth isn’t working. We avoid talking about the skewed distribution of the plane t’s wealth and income, dreaming instead that we can grow our way out of the prob lem. So the richest 20% of the world’s population consumes the lion’s share of resources, while the poorest 80% have to get by on the crumbs. And the ratios are getting worse. Growth is an excuse for continued inequality. But, more
importantly, countless studies show that beyond a certain point higher levels of material consumption do not lead to increased well-being or happiness.
Per capita GDP has tripled in the United States since 1950, but the percentage of people who say they are happy has declined since the 1970s. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, in their book The Spirit Level, note that poor nations with lower inequality have higher levels of well-being than richer but more unequal nations. We place growth above equality and pay a price in what’s called “the hidden injuries of class.” Shorter, unhealthier, and unhappier lives addicted to a mindless consumerism that is depleting the planet’s resources.
Free market cheerleaders believe that technology and human ingenuity will solve the problem. The economy can be “de-coupled” from material inputs, they claim, and improved technology will allow us to produce more wealth with less energy, materials, and waste. This is whistling in the dark. Between 1970 and 2000, rich countries saw impressive gains in energy efficiency of up to 40%; but average improvements of 2% a year were eclipsed by growth rates of 3% or more. Increased technical efficiency is swamped by increased consumption.
A recent report by the New Economics Foundation found that, to stabilize carbon emissions at 350 ppm by 2050, the carbon intensity of the global economy would need to fall by 95%. Ramping up GDP without improving technological efficiency leads to more environmental damage. Yet improving efficiency leads to more growth, which leads to the same result.
We’ve been captured by a myth far more alluring than the one that Charles Darwin confronted 150 years ago: the dream of perpetual economic growth. In the North we have been living
beyond our ecological means for decades, consuming too much and producing more waste than the environment can absorb, while inequality grows.
The global population is expected to jump by 3 billion in the next 40 years—more than the entire population in 1950.
Most of that increase will be in the South, where poverty is entrenched and living standards desperate. How will those next three billion live? Justice demands that we in the rich countries ratchet back our growth and clear some space for those who need it. The fate of planet Earth may depend on it.
Are we up to it?
The economy is a human construct. It’s not an act of God. We made it, we can change it.。