Ventajas y limitaciones

As a generation, we have inherited the accumulated resources of our planet: fertile soils, forests, oil, coal and minerals like iron and bauxite. We began the twentieth century with a relatively clean and stable natural global environment. On this basis we have built an economy that produces, for the upper- and middle-class citizens of developed nations, an unprecedented standard of luxury, supplemented by an extraordinary range of gadgets. The global economy now pro- duces as much in seventeen days as the economy of our grand- parents, around the turn of the century, produced in a year.6

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the economy we have built depends on using up our inherit- ance. Since the middle of the century the world has doubled its per capita use of energy, steel, copper and wood. Con- sumption of meat has doubled in the same period and car ownership has quadrupled. And these are items that were already being used in large quantities in 1950; the increase for relatively new materials, like plastic and aluminium, is higher still. Since 1940, Americans alone have used up as large a share of the earth's mineral resources as did everyone before them put together.7

I read once of a corporate manager whose division was the slackest in the entire corporation. Productivity was appalling, and it seemed inevitable that the division was running at a loss. Yet, year after year, the accounts showed that the divi- sion had produced a respectable profit. The secret was that a previous division manager had bought a large area of land for possible future expansion. Encroaching suburbs had made the land very valuable, and the division manager was now selling a sizable chunk each year for a very healthy profit. His immediate superior was aware of how the trick of finishing the year in the black was done, but had no interest in putting a stop to it, because the profitable results improved the appearance of the overall performance in the several divisions for which he was responsible. We are playing the same trick in our national accounts. We are eating up capital, rather than living on what we produce. The faster we chop down our forests, sell off our minerals and use up the fertility of our soils, the more our Gross National Product grows. In our stupidity, we take this to be a sign of our prosperity, rather than a sign of the speed at which we are using up our capital. From the food we produce to the exhaust we emit from our cars, the pattern is the same. We take what we want from the earth, and leave behind toxic chemical dumps, polluted streams, oil slicks on the oceans, and nuclear wastes that will

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be deadly for tens of thousands of years. The economy is a sub-system of the biosphere, and it is rapidly running up against the limits of the larger system.

Many of the costs of economic growth have been familiar since the factories of the industrial revolution began belching their fumes across England, and a once-green area of the West Midlands became so despoiled and covered in industrial grime that it is still known as the Black Country. Only now, however, are we realizing that our most precious finite resource is the atmosphere itself. We think of the nineteenth century as a period of dirty industries polluting the atmosphere, but since 1950, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmos- phere has climbed by more than it did in the previous two centuries. The result is likely to be the end of climate stability, with the immediate effect being to make the planet warmer than it has been at any time in human history.8 Acid rain,

another outcome of atmospheric pollution, is destroying ancient forests in Europe and North America. The use of gases that destroy the ozone layer is a third atmospheric prob- lem that has already, according to the United States Environ- mental Protection Authority, ensured that there will be an additional 200,000 deaths from skin cancer in the US alone over the next fifty years.9

Consider food, something really basic to life that we do not normally associate with consumerism. The United States began the century with some of the richest, deepest soils in the world. Now the farming methods it uses are responsible for the loss of about seven billion tonnes of topsoil each year - Iowa, for example, has lost over half its topsoil in less than a century. In dry areas these methods are using up underground water supplies like the Ogallala Aquifer that underlies the cattle country from Western Texas to Nebraska — an irre- placeable resource that has taken millions of years to accu- mulate. Finally and most significantly, these farming methods

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are also energy intensive, relying on fossil fuels for machinery and for the production of chemical fertilizers. Traditionally, agriculture was a way of using the fertility of the soil and the energy provided by sunlight to increase the amount of energy available to us. Corn grown by small farmers in Mexico, for example, produces 83 calories of energy for every calorie of fossil fuel energy used. Beef produced in an American feedlot reverses the equation: it uses 33 calories of fossil fuel energy for every calorie of food energy it produces. We have devel- oped a pattern of agriculture that relies on using up stored energy instead of capturing solar energy.

Nor is any of this being done in response to any crisis of hunger or malnutrition. It is the appetite for huge quantities of meat - especially beef - that is primarily responsible. Although red meat consumption has declined in recent years in the United States and some other developed nations, it remains at levels that are, historically speaking, far above those of most other human cultures. The Western image of the good life is one in which there is a slab of steak on every plate and a chicken in every foil bag. To produce this, we have invented an entirely new form of farming in which pigs, chickens and veal calves never see sunlight or walk in the fields, and cattle spend much of their lives packed into feed- lots, eating grain instead of grazing on the grass for which their stomachs are suited. The animals have ceased to be regarded as our fellow sentient beings; instead they are treated as machines for converting cheap grain into high-priced flesh.10

But I have discussed the ethics of our treatment of animals elsewhere; here my concern is the inefficiency of intensive animal raising.

We are using our best soils to grow grain and soybeans in order to feed them to cattle, pigs and chickens, whose car- casses will return only a small fraction of the food value to the humans who eat them. When we raise cattle in feedlots,

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for example, only 11 percent of the grain goes to produce the beef itself, with the remainder being burned off as energy, excreted, or absorbed into parts of the body that are not eaten. Cattle in feedlots produce less than 50 kilograms of protein from the consumption of over 790 kilograms of plant protein.'' The huge appetite for beef in industrialized nations is a form of conspicuous consumption that drives us to demand more and more land and resources. In the affluent nations, each citizen is responsible for the consumption of nearly 1 tonne of grain every year; in India, the comparable figure is no more than a quarter of a tonne. The difference is accounted for not by our eating more bread or pasta (we physically could not eat that much grain in this way) but by the pile of grain hidden behind every steak, every slice of ham, and every leg of chicken we consume.

Because we equate the good life with meat on the table, there are now three times as many domestic animals on this planet as there are human beings. The weight of the world's 1.28 billion cattle is greater than that of the entire human population. In the last thirty years more than 25 percent of the forests of Central America have been cut down so that cattle can graze where the forest once stood. In Brazil the bulldozers are still pushing on, clearing the Amazon jungle so that cattle can graze for a few years. More than 40 million hectares have gone already, an area larger than the whole of Japan.12 Once the soil has lost its fertility the cattle ranchers

will move on, but the forest will not return. When the forests are cleared billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide are released into the atmosphere, enhancing the greenhouse effect.

The destruction of the rainforests is not the only way in which the huge population of animals being raised for food contributes to warming the greenhouse. Cattle fart large quantities of methane, the most potent of all the greenhouse

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gases. The world's cattle are thought to produce about 20 percent of the methane released into the atmosphere, and methane traps twenty-five times as much heat from the sun as carbon dioxide. Chemical fertilizers used to*grow crops to feed the animals we eat produce nitrous oxide, another green- house gas. The heavy use of fossil fuels also contributes to the greenhouse effect. By eating so many animals and animal products we are helping to heat up our planet. The local effects of this are difficult to predict, but some areas that now support large populations would be stricken by droughts, while others get more rain. What is predictable is that sea levels — which have already risen by between 10 and 20 centimetres over the past century — will rise further as polar ice melts. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has esti- mated a 44-centimetre rise by 2070.l3 This means that entire

island nations like Tuvalu, Vanuatu, the Marshall Islands, and the Maldives, could disappear. It has been reported that the government of the Maldives has already had to evacuate four islands. A report on the Marshall Islands produced by the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administra- tion concludes that within a generation, 'many parts of the islands may be unsafe to live on'.1 4 That is serious enough,

but the loss of human life could be greater still in densely populated low-lying delta areas like the Nile Delta and the , delta region of Bengal. The latter, which makes up 80 percent of Bangladesh, is already prone to violent storms and floods. In these two regions alone, the selfishness of the rich is, by its effect on rising sea levels, putting the land and lives of 46 million people at risk.'5 In addition, we can expect the

loss of entire ecological systems, and the species of animals and plants that are restricted to them, because such systems will be unable to adapt to the rapidity of artificially induced climatic change.

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How an overflowing sink makes Adam