Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition (25 page)

Understanding this principle, some visionary businesspeople have attempted to realize it voluntarily through concepts like the “triple bottom line” and “full-cost accounting.” The idea is that their company will act to maximize not just its own profits, but the aggregate of people, planet, and profit—the three bottom lines. The problem is that these companies must compete with others who do the opposite: export their costs onto people and the planet. The triple bottom line and full-cost accounting are useful as a way to evaluate public policy (because they include more than just economic benefits) but when it comes to private enterprise, the first two Ps often run counter to the third. If I am a fisherman trying to fish sustainably, competing with industrial trawlers with hundred-mile-long nets, my higher costs will render me unable to compete. That is why some means is needed to force the internalization of costs and integrate the triple bottom line into a single bottom line that includes all three. We cannot merely hope that people “get it.” We must create a system that aligns self-interest with the good of all.

One way to bring externalized costs (and externalized benefits)
onto the balance sheet is through cap-and-trade systems and other tradable emissions allowances.
³
Although such systems have borne mixed results in practice (sulfur dioxide ceilings have been relatively successful, while the EU’s carbon credits have been a disaster), in principle they allow us to implement a collective agreement on how much is enough. “Enough” depends on the capacity of the planet or the bioregion to assimilate the substance in question. For sulfur dioxide, Europe and America might have separate ceilings to control acid rain; Los Angeles might have its own ozone or nitrous oxide ceiling; the planet might have a single CO
₂
and CFC ceiling. Enforcing aggregate ceilings circumvents Jevon’s paradox, which says that improvements in efficiency don’t necessarily lead to less consumption but can even lead to greater consumption by reducing prices and freeing capital for yet more production.
⁴

Considerable controversy surrounds present-day cap-and-trade proposals, and by and large, I agree with their critics. A truly effective emissions allowance program would be an auction system with no offsets, no free credits, no grandfather clauses, and strict sanctions on noncomplying countries. Even so, problems remain: price volatility, speculative derivatives trading, and corruption. Enforcement is an especially critical problem because cap-and-trade gives a big advantage to manufacturers in places with lax enforcement, which could result in more total pollution than the present regulatory
regime.
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Another problem is that in a cap-and-trade system, individual restraint frees up resources or allowances to be used by someone else, leading to a feeling of personal powerlessness.

The problems with cap-and-trade suggest a different approach: direct taxes on pollution, such as Paul Hawken’s carbon tax. Fossil fuels could be taxed on import, and the proceeds rebated to the public. This is another way to force the internalization of costs, and would be especially appropriate in situations where the social and environmental costs are easy to quantify and remedy. As with cap-and-trade, international enforcement is a big problem, as manufacturing would become more profitable in countries that refused to levy the tax or collected it inefficiently. It might also require frequent rate adjustment in order to attain the desired ceiling.

For those readers who recoil at the suggestion of another tax, consider that the two mechanisms I have described, cap-and-trade systems and green taxes, are not actually new levies upon society. Someone is going to be paying the costs of environmental destruction regardless. In the present system, this “someone” is either innocent bystanders or future generations. These proposals merely shift these costs onto those who create them and profit from them.

However it is accomplished, when the costs of pollution are internalized, the best business decision comes into alignment with the best environmental decision. Suppose you are an inventor and you come up with a great idea for a factory to cut pollution by 90 percent with no loss of productivity. Today, that factory has no incentive to implement your idea because it doesn’t pay the costs of that pollution. If, however, the cost of pollution were internalized,
your invention would be a hot item. A whole new set of economic incentives emerges from the internalization of costs. The goodness of our hearts, which want to cut pollution even if it isn’t economic, would no longer have to do battle with the pressures of money.

While both cap-and-trade programs and pollution taxes have a role to play in the internalization of social and ecological costs, we could also integrate them into the structure of money itself, an intentional kind of money that embodies our reverence for the planet and our emerging sense of the role and purpose of humanity on earth. It unites the internalization of costs with the rectification of the great injustice of property described in
Chapter 4
, returning the commons to the people while nonetheless giving free rein to the spirit of entrepreneurship. It implements the principle of
Chapter 9
: to make money sacred by backing it with the things that have become sacred to us. Among them are precisely the same things that green taxes and the like aim to preserve. While the details of cap-and-trade, currency issue, and so forth may have a technocratic feel to them, the underlying impulse, which the next chapter will flesh out, is to align money with the things we hold sacred.

Whether it is accomplished through traditional taxation or cap-and-trade, or by integrating it into money itself, we are embarking on a profoundly different relationship to Earth. In the days of the Ascent, the story of the growth of the human realm and the conquest of the wild, in the time of humanity’s childhood, when the world seemed to have infinite room to accommodate our growth, there was no need for collective agreements on how many fish to catch, how many trees to cut, how much ore to dig, or how much of the atmosphere’s capacity to absorb waste to use. Today, our relationship to the rest of nature is changing on a fundamental level, as it is impossible to ignore the limits of the environment. The fisheries,
the forests, the clean water, and the clean air are all obviously close to depletion. We have the power to destroy the earth, or at least to cause her grievous harm. She is vulnerable to us, as a lover is to a lover. In that sense, it is no longer appropriate to think of her only as Mother Earth. A child, in his wanting, does not take his mother’s limits into account. Between lovers it is different. That is why I foresee a future in which we maintain local, regional, and global ceilings on the use of various resources. Fishery catches, ground-water use, carbon emissions, timber harvests, topsoil depletion, and many more will be carefully monitored and held to sustainable levels. These resources—clean water, clean air, minerals, biota, and more—will be sacred to us, so sacred that I doubt we will refer to them as “resources,” any more than we refer to our own vital organs as resources, or dream of depleting them.

Actually, we
do
deplete our own vital organs, for purposes analogous to those for which we deplete the vital organs of the earth. As one would expect from an understanding of the connected self, what we do to the earth, we do to ourselves. The parallels run deep, so for brevity’s sake I’ll limit myself to just one: the parallel between our drawdown of the earth’s stored fossil fuel and the depletion of the adrenal glands through chemical and psychological stimulants. In traditional Chinese medical thought, the adrenal glands are part of the kidney organ system, which is understood to be the reservoir of the original qi, the life force, as well as the gateway to an ongoing supply of acquired qi. When we are in harmony with our life purpose, these gateways to the life force open wide and give us a constant supply of energy. But when we lose this alignment, we must use increasingly violent methods (coffee, motivational techniques, threats) to jerk the life force through the adrenals. Similarly, the technologies we use to access fossil fuels have become more and more violent—hydraulic
fracturing (or fracking), mountaintop removal, tar sand exploitation, and so on—and we are using these fuels for frivolous or destructive purposes that are evidently out of alignment with the purpose of the human species on earth. The personal and planetary mirror each other. The connection is more than mere analogy: the kind of work that we use coffee and external motivation (e.g., money) to force ourselves to do is precisely the kind of work that contributes to the despoliation of the planet. We don’t really want to do it to our bodies; we don’t really want to do it to the world.

We want to become givers and not just takers in our relationship to Earth. With that in mind, I will touch upon one more aspect of the law of return and the cosmic unity of giving and receiving. It would seem that there is a flagrant exception to the law of return in nature, something that ecosystems do not recycle, something that enters constantly anew and exits always as waste. That something is energy. Radiating out from the sun, it is captured by plants and converted along the food chain from one form to another, moving irreversibly toward its final destination: waste heat. Sooner or later, all the low-entropy electromagnetic radiation from the sun is radiated back out from the earth as high-entropy heat.
⁶

I am not surprised that ancient people worshiped the sun, the only thing we know that gives without expectation or even possibility of return. The sun is generosity manifest. It powers the entire kingdom of life, and, in the form of fossil fuels, solar, wind, and hydroelectric power, can power the technosphere as well. Marveling at this virtually limitless source of free energy, I can touch upon the utter, almost infantile, gratitude that ancient sun-worshipers must have felt.

But there is more to the story. A vein runs through spiritual tradition that says that we, too, give back to the sun; indeed that the sun only continues to shine through our gratitude.
⁷
Ancient sun rituals weren’t only to thank the sun—they were to keep it shining. Solar energy is the light of earthly love reflected back at us. Here, too, the circle of the gift operates. We are not separate from even the sun, which is why, perhaps, we can sometimes feel an inner sun shining from within us, irradiating all others with the warmth and light of generosity.

We live on a naturally abundant planet, the source of life-sustaining gifts for us all. As observed in
Chapter 4
, the planet’s riches—soil, water, air, minerals, the genome—were created by no man and should therefore be the property of none, but held in common stewardship for all beings. The same holds for the accumulation of human technology and culture, which is the bequest of our collective forebears, a source of wealth that no living person deserves less than any other.

But what to do with this realization? These truths are closely aligned with the Marxist and anarchist critique of property, but the Marxist solution—collective ownership of the means of production, administered by the state—does not reach deeply enough; nor does it address the real problem.
¹
The real problem is that in both the communist and corporate-capitalist systems, a power elite makes and benefits from the decision of how to deploy society’s wealth.
The convention of property—common or private—is used in both cases to justify and facilitate the allocation of wealth and power.

The metamorphosis of human economy that is underway in our time will go more deeply than the Marxist revolution because the Story of the People that it weaves won’t be just a new fiction of ownership, but a recognition of its fictive, conventional nature. What is property but a social agreement that a certain person has certain rights to use something in certain prescribed ways? Property is not an objective feature of reality, and to reify it and make it into something elemental, as both capitalistic and communistic theory do, is to unconsciously enslave ourselves to the story that contains it. I do not think that a sacred economics can start with ownership as an elemental property because that conception buys into a worldview, a story of self and world, that is not true, or that is true no longer—the discrete and separate self in an objective universe. So instead of saying, as a Marxist might, that the bequest of nature and culture should be collectively owned, let us cease applying the concept of property to these things altogether and think instead of how to justly, creatively, and beautifully embody their value in an economic system.