Another problem with Conservation and the solution to the whole problem

The mentality of conservation is that we need to do more the protect wildlife. Yet the problem is clearly rather that we are doing something wrong. Conservation is not about doing anything, but about stopping or changing something that we are doing.

Now the problem is really a problem of the last 50 years. It is true that over the last half a million years humans have created many extinctions from Wholly Mammoths to Dodos but the problem has never been systemic before. Now the whole planet is threatened.

Many targets have been selected and picked up by the media and politics.

Invasive species is one. Rodents and cats on islands have decimated native populations around the world. Some funding can bring in a Rentokill company to eradicate them and problem solved.

Habitat loss is mentioned, and the solution is the power of politics and the law to protect land in reserves. (capitalism)

Plastics have recently been mentioned and the solution is for consumers to reduce our use of plastics and push industry to use it less.

Climate Change is the big one and the solution is again the power of politics (but not the law this time) to force industry to reduce CO2 emissions.

Acid rain was one and the solution there was the power of politics to reduce sulphur emissions. This has allowed forests and wildlife to recover.

Ozone hole was another and again power of politics over industry limited the release of chemicals that were seen to damage the ozone. There is evidence of a recovery here and harmful radiation levels are reducing.

In all these programs the solution has been government enforcing change in industry. Or it has been governments using its power of property to force protection areas. In almost no situation ever has industry led to conservation efforts. One possible exception is wildlife tourism which is the great hope of conservation. Yet it is usually government bans on the actions of industry that create a space where the conservation industry can get a foot hold.

So it appears that the problem is industry itself. And why should industry be a problem? Industry is a machine with a goal of wealth creation. In particular since the 1980s the single goal of industry and business graduates has been financial profit. Thus left to its own devices the result of industry will be financial wealth. Yet conservation has a different goal: natural wealth. As a result industry and conservation are working towards different goals.

Now the industry theorists will say that the two goals are the same. Adam Smith argued that in a free market with every agent working towards their own selfish interests the market will act to arbitrate supply and demand in an optimal way. Its works by setting the price so that high demand goods have an upward price pressure, and high supply goods have a downward price pressure. The result is that goods find their way to where they are needed. Industry will argue that conservation concerns will be expressed in the market as buying and selling actions that benefit the natural world. So for example concern for the welfare of the Tiger will result in money finding its way to tiger conservation and out weighting the income from hunters working either for trade or to protect live stock.

But it is clearly not working. Does this mean that people simply do not care about the environment and so market choices are not being made in favour of it? The recent concern over plastics has shown that people action in markets can work and changes of behaviour can effect conservation. The BBC, as a service provider rather than profit driven, is in a central position across the Common Wealth to educate people of the impacts they are having on the planet and the extraordinary and invaluable work of people like David Attenborough and Chris Packham are central to this. But not again it is not industry here but publicly funded, government run, media that is leading the way. Industry somehow is opposed to conservation. Industry is not working.

Markets are considerably more complex that Adam Smith could have ever known in the 18th Century. They are fractal for example with complex feedback loops, they suffer from all kinds of network problems. But the main problem is that they are not free. Obviously this is true in that it is in financial interest to fix markets: like all gambling halls the outcome is rigged. But more intrinsically people must make a living. We do not have a choice to buy and sell in a market: we have to buy and sell to live. The unemployed, without a government social system, are dead. This is because we live in a system of property where by law things are owned. It means that you cannot gain access to anything without ownership, and to own we need money. And you get money, by selling the things you own, or critically renting the things you own. That latter option is the essence of Capitalism which we will see is a essence of the problem for conservation. If you find anything physical it will be owned by the land owner, so you if you don't own any land you cannot gain possession of anything. The only place that property does not exist is in inventions and ideas. So unless you are lucky enough to think of something valuable and original and you can get property rights to your idea, or exploit it quick enough before others copy you then you can only gain income from "employment." That means accepting labour from someone who owns. This is the first principle of Capitalism that those who do not own, must gain employment from those that do. Without ownership starting up a company is difficult because you cannot even borrow money without collateral. In Capitalism how much you can make, depends a lot on how much you already own. So there is a whole class of people who have no choice in life but to work for a living. They do not care what they do, they just want an income so that they can buy the bare essentials upon which to live.

This would work fine from a conservation perspective but for machines. Economies are never static. Changes in technology quickly make people redundant and they need to reskill and exploit new markets. One might think that when combine harvesters made 120 people unemployed for each harvester these people would be able to finally sit down and enjoy the productivity of those machines. Indeed where is the John Steinbeck story of itinerant workers saving their income to buy a combine harvester and then lazing the summer away while it did their work for them. Of course no such thing. The land owner makes them redundant and buys the machine himself. These unemployed people then need to find new work and so economies are always been driven forward. This is not a free market, there is no choice but to keep producing for its own sake and this endless engine is at odds with the natural world which exists untouched and unimproved by industry.

The second principle of capitalism is that ownership can provide returns on investment if we invest it: that is give it up for rent. This means that capitalists have a vested interest in growth. So as a result in capitalist countries government is lobbied to encourage growth. This policy is sold to the public as job creation, but no one ever asks where the jobs went in the first place so that new jobs needed to be created. As just explained those jobs were swallowed up by machines and improving efficiency, but the benefits of which are never seen by the wider economy obnly the owners of capital. The beneficiaries of growth are actually mainly the owners of industry and with a simple equation that greater growth means greater returns on investment the endless machine of industry forever expanding and using natural resources is assured.

Capitalism is often argued to be the "natural" state of humans. It mirrors the natural world. But this is not true. Capitalism is based upon property and that is enforced by government. Capitalism is a government decision and the maintenance of capitalism is government policy. This is why government reforms in the 80s caused the current hyper expansion of economies. If capitalism was natural it would have happened by itself.

What is natural however is mafias, or the wild west. What naturally happens in a power vacuum like post war Iraq is a battle for power. Gangs form both opportunistically to exploit people, but also defensively to protect one from other gangs. This logic drives a system of conflict until large gang leaders exist like in the maffia. In British history this process of endless warfare and uncertainty eventually led to a "social contract" where the Barons agreed to all support one leader, in UK history that was the King. This is a Nash Equilibrium. The king was leader, but with extremely restricted powers. And the rest of the gang leaders agreed to support him and so defer their own powers in return for peace with the other gang members. And so you end up with government as the final process of succession in the struggle for power. This is the natural process. Capitalism is not natural and was invented in the 18th Century at the advent of the Industrial Revolution to organise the transitions in economy to ward mechanised mass production and huge profits generated by factories.

So with government both behind Capitalism and behind Conservation efforts actually the problem lies in government balance of decisions. Industry has a disproportionate lobby group in parliament. There are probably less that 5,000 significant capitalists in the UK but their voice is heard much louder than the 66 million other people. This makes Capitalists lords with voices 13000 times greater than the common man. And within them are a few whose voice is absurdly loud: the kings so to speak of the modern system. The problem for conservation is that Chris Packham and Michaela Strachan only have limited mandate given to them by government, while the heads of the bank of England for example have a voice in parliament thousands of times greater than these two. But these two do have the ears of the population and perhaps with 66 million people listening to the concerns of Spring Watch, even if they do not watch it, government can be persuaded not to listened to the Capitalists so much. What a nonsense Adam Smith would make of the system today, with his free market being abused by a handful of incredibly powerful people lobbying government decisions on economic policy.

The most famous twisting of government policy incidentally was the phase of market liberalisation under the Republican and Labour tenures. The first thing Labour did when they took office in 1997 was hand interest rates to the Bank Of England. That is the decisions for the whole economy started to be made by a private company with no democratic mandate or responsibility! Unsurprisingly interest rates were kept low and the markets were over heated. They were able to do this by not including housing prices in the inflation figures. Thus they reported low inflation, when in fact it was run away and a bubble was forming. Mervyn King went on radio to explain that they couldn't include houses in the inflation figures because it was impossible to do in a standard way that would make inflation figures comparable across Europe. What a standard "legalese" "paperwork" way of avoiding the point. It's not the inflation figures that matter, but rather setting inflation figures to stop the markets overheating. And this guy was left in charge of the Bank Of England. This episode with years of the hand over of control to the city demonstrates to my mind what a collection of klutzes work in that sector and why democratic government should never trust them with the keys to the economy. Needless to say the markets over heated and then government was then twisted to bail them out, with tax payers money paid by people whose control of the economy had been handed away in the first place. A perfect example of absolute power corrupts and our financial centres have too much power. A real sceptic would say the whole thing was centrally planned to inject wealth into the economy to protect it from the aftermath of the DotCom bust. But all this policy is designed to do one thing: maintain growth and protect the assets of capitalists. And that mentality is against even Adam Smith  and certainly is the root of the Conservation problem.

So there is something fundamentally wrong is the way we do things, and there is no fix other than stopping doing things this way. The key bastion of contemporary economics that must go is Growth. Economies must be driven for stability or even reduction in size. How ludicrous it is to have conservationists calling for Reuse, Reduce and Recycle while at the other lobby group is asking for Increase, Increase, Increase. Reduce means Economic Reduction as a whole.

This is the stuff of revolution. We sit on the edge of a paradigm where the mentality and fabric of class system and Owners and Non-Owners, or Haves and Have-Nots is under threat. And there is no other way. We either lose the Planet and spin it all up in products to generate profit. And when this planet is exploited we move someone else to exploit that. Or we stop. These are the clear battle lines. Conservation and Have-Nots say stop. Industry and Capitalists says accelerate.

Now the Capitalists own the media and they spend a lot of time printing certain ideas in the hope of fooling the public. One such idea is that economic growth is needed to create jobs and that benefits the have-nots. What a coincidence that the thing the Capitalists most need which is returns on investment is not sold as personal gain to the owners of industry, but is rather sold as the benefit of the common people.

To bring the economy to a stand still there needs to be another way to redistribute wealth other than labour. Working for a living is a rather new concept that arose originally around 7000 years ago with the start of farming. Before that hunter gathers did not work, they rather reaped the benefits of a rich natural world. Work done on the lifestyles of existing hunter gatherers estimates that they need to do been 2 and 6 hours of searching per day to get the resources they need to live. Polynesian Islanders have it easiest with just 2 hours fishing and gathering shell fish on the shore. But they don't see it as creation or labour and there is nothing to own except perhaps a boat. They are simply going to Nature's Store and taking whatever they need, and there is no rush because on the next tide all the shelves are restocked. I have a video of a tribes person from South America having seen the white Mans world puzzling over the use of money. He cannot understand why you need money to get things from a shop when he can just go into the jungle and take everything he needs. Hunter Gathering is not based on exchange value, Nature is the generous provider and she is loved deeply for that as much as a mother. This is the mentality of Mother Earth. This is the mentality of Conservation also: that Nature is the generous provider and something to be deeply loved as it is unimproved before industry owns it, does any value added and attaches a price to it. I have another video of Kalahari Bushmen having been relocated to purpose built housing and given jobs complaining how hard and boring this new life is. It is quite a far cry from the Capitalist propaganda that life before the rise of factories and industry was "nasty, brutish and short." Ironically it is the rather the rise of Capitalism that is the cause of most of the world's hardships and woes. when we think of abject poverty we are thinking of displaced unemployed people from the Victorian or Colonial periods when capitalists owned all the land, and people were left starving with no means of sustenance. Indeed one of the worst genocides in history was caused by the British in Bengal exporting food for their war effort and leaving millions to perish instead. How ironic that we celebrate liberating the Nazi Work camps and saving millions, while the cost was millions dying in the work camp of Bengal: a whole country turned in a work camp by Capitalism where the local people of that country had no access to food because it was all owned by the British. That is the power of Capitalism to deprive people. And this is the power that drive industry endlessly forward and which ultimately causes the current Holocaust of Nature.

So how can we distribute wealth? Reading any Jane Austin or contemporary novel it can be seen that Capitalism famously enabled the landed gentry to have an "income." This is actually the same as the feudal system where ownership of land came with an income paid by the tenants of that land (the people whose home it was!). Throughout history the wealthy have always enjoyed a free income, that they are deserved by virtue of their status. The problem in fact with free handouts in that the poor are still not considered worth it. This part of the class system is still strong. When Thatcher called for an end to the class system I'm not sure she quite knew what she was asking for. She was asking for the right of anyone to gain a free income not just the wealthy land and share owners. In a genuinely free society the right to income must be uncoupled from labour. For the working class to be finally buried in history means that workers and owners both should be able to gain free income. Its interesting that the word Business is derived from the word "busy", and the word lazy and laziness is still seen as the opposite of busy. The busy shall be afforded income, but the lazy shall perish I can imagine the Bible saying for this is certainly a biblical way of thinking. Remembering the hunter gatherers: treat nature well and she will provide for you. There is no need for business. This is a creation of capitalism to encourage growth and returns on investment for the owners of industry.

There are calls for Universal Credit at the moment. I have not read the arguments but in this post exist plenty of arguments. Free income has been an established feature of economies since the start of property ownership. We don't need to argue for that, we simply need to argue that it is extended from the rich to also the poor. This has one immediate economic benefit as it will remove the need for labour in acquiring money and so will actually increase the money velocity and grow the economy. But at the same time will remove the necessity of people to work for their basic survival. People will finally return to a state of near freedom like they had 7000 years ago. What we do with our life will not be driven by the fear of starvation like it is today, a problem first created by property. Look at the Bible for the stories of famines in Egypt and elsewhere in the Bronze age. This was never a problem before. All humans will be able to enjoy the life style of the aristocracy and we can see that some wasted their lives in drugs and parties these were a minority that were frowned upon. It is from the aristocracy that came have all the advances in science and art. Humans are creative, it is not something that needs to be forced from them like a performing animal. And following on from the previous post this belief in the Nature both human and non-human and valuing it just as it is is the essence of a happiness and fulfilled life. Indeed Capitalism creates unhappiness, because only unhappy people are busy struggling endlessly to make themselves happy. This is not quite true: compassionate people can be busy too as they try their best to help the people around them: but their goal is not exhaustion but just to use their time well.

So when the government finally wakes up the problem their are truly radical changes to be eased in to society and the vision we have of human life. It will not be without its opponents however as the whole ruling class of the globe are opposed to this as they currently enjoy enormous power and wealth from the current system. They may need to be publically named and shamed like in Ancient Greece where the aristos constantly felt a need to be popular with the demos not least because they faced ostracism. A system of ostracism for the likes of Mervyn King and others who have shamelessly protected the interests of a select few is a fanciful possibility. Perhaps the internet is enough to provide a voice to the people and free from the editorial controls of the Capitalism owned media, a free space to actually criticise the real problems of the oligarchy the control policy in the country and abroad.

Conservation then like the last post is not a trivial add on the status quo. It is a fundmental uprooting of a tree that does not work. A revoicing of mentalities that have been taken a back seat for 7000 years or more, and a look toward a world that appreciates itself as it is, appreciates everyone in it, and asks us each to appreciate ourselves and the world just as it is.