Right Relationship

“We are all stewards of the earth, but often lack specific information and advice on what we can do . . . [This] provides a wonderful guide for all of us.” —President Jimmy Carter
 
Our current economic system—which assumes endless growth and limitless potential wealth—flies in the face of the fact that the earth’s resources are finite. The result is increasing destruction of the natural world and growing, sometimes lethal, tension between rich and poor, global north and south. Trying to fix problems piecemeal is not the solution. We need a comprehensive new vision of an economy that can serve people and all of life’s commonwealth. 
 
Peter G. Brown and Geoffrey Garver use the core Quaker principle of “right relationship”—interacting in a way that is respectful to all and that aids the common good—as the foundation for a new economic model. Right Relationship poses five basic questions: What is an economy for? How does it work? How big is too big? What’s fair? And how can it best be governed? Brown and Garver expose the antiquated, shortsighted, and downright dangerous assumptions that underlie our current answers to these questions, as well as the shortcomings of many current reform efforts. They propose new answers that combine an acute awareness of ecological limits with a fundamental focus on fairness and a concern with the spiritual, as well as material, well-being of the human race. 
 
Brown and Garver describe new forms of global governance that will be needed to get and keep the economy in right relationship. Individual citizens can and must play a part in bringing this relationship with life and the world into being.Foreword by Thomas E. Lovejoy
Preface
Introduction: Moving from Wrong to Right Relationship
Chapter One: What’s the Economy's For?: A Flourishing Commonwealth of Life
Chapter Two: How Does It Work?: Putting the Economy in Its Place
Chapter Three: How Big Is Too Big?: Boundaries on Consumption and Waste
Chapter Four: What’s Fair?: Sharing Life’s Bounty
Chapter Five: Governance: New Ways to Stay in Bounds and Play Fair
Conclusion: Four Steps to a Whole Earth Economy
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
About the Moral Economy Project
About the Authors“Bearing witness to a right relationship between people and nature, Brown and Garver provide better advice for an ecologically sustainable and socially just economy than all the Nobel laureates in economics combined.”
—Richard B. Norgaard, Professor of Energy and Resources, University of California, Berkeley

“This book deserves to sell a million copies. The questions asked—and answered—in Right Relationship make a vastly more important contribution to our future than analytical models for maximizing GDP.”
—Herman Daly, Professor, School of Public Policy, University of Maryland, and winner of the 1996 Right Livelihood Award

“The need for radical new ideas, not just reform, to reconstitute the existing economic system has never been more urgent. This monumental book makes a compelling case for the ‘right’ relationship between human activity and the natural world as the basis for the kind of model that is essential to put us on the pathway to a secure and sustainable future. It is imperative reading for all policy makers and the people on whose participation and support they depend.”
—Maurice Strong, former Under Secretary-General and Special Advisor to the Secretary-General of the United Nations

“Out of the rich Quaker tradition of personal commitment to peace, equality, and justice comes this powerful call to transform our relationship to the earth and its commonwealth of life. In recognizing the inherent connections between ecological health, social well-being, and a moral economy, the authors have provided, for Quakers and non-Quakers alike, light amid the darkness.”
—Curt Meine, conservationist and author of Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work

“Right Relationship offers up a welcome and needed change to the technocratic and ethically empty programs that have dominated the sustainability challenge. At the same time the book grounds its arguments in practical terms that can be enacted into new forms of governance and social behavior.”
—John R. Ehrenfeld, Executive Director, International Society for Industrial Ecology, and author of Sustainability by Design

“The challenge mankind faces of turning around our planetary emergency will require a revolution as enormous as the agricultural revolution ten thousand years ago. Our only chance for effecting this transformation in the basic ways we do business with the planet is for a critical mass of the population to ‘get it.’ Right Relationship lays out the case as comprehensively and compellingly as any work on the subject that has come to my attention.”
—Alex Shoumatoff, Contributing Editor, Vanity Fair, and author/editor of DispatchesFromTheVanishingWorld.com

“This book looks at the root causes of our accelerating ecological problems. It should be read by politicians, business leaders, the public, and above all our youth. It is they who have to face the con- sequences of past actions. Reading this book, I hope they will unite and speak with one voice for economic and institutional change to create a right relationship between humans and our planet.”
—Helen R. Hughes, first Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, New Zealand

“Right Relationship is the right book at the right time. It is a com- pass directing us toward a life-centered economy that reflects our highest values.”
—David Orr, Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics, Oberlin College

“Right Relationship is absolutely right: we need to redesign our economic system so that our relationship to life trumps our relation- ship to profit. Peter Brown and his colleagues show us how this can be done. Everyone who wants a better world should read this book.”
—Peter Barnes, author of Capitalism 3.0

“To reclaim modern economics from the gospel of infinite growth and an idolatry of the market is to be reminded of the wisdom of Aquinas who noted that what is required for genuine happiness is sufficiency of material goods and virtuous action. This book pro- vides an important road map for virtuous action in building a new civilization of love and an economy of well-being built on the pillars of the four virtues of western civilization, which Plato defined as courage, moderation, justice, and wisdom.”
—Mark Anielski, author of The Economics of Happiness: Building Genuine Wealth; CEO, Anielski Management; and Adjunct Professor, University of Alberta School of Business

“In 1942 Aldo Leopold wrote, ‘Our whole cultural structure is built of non-durable materials which will sag as the land weakens.’ This persuasive and compelling book elaborates on this theme: a weakened and sagging land. But it offers us hope with an innovative framework for change—a new story. Brown and Garver envision a global community, a whole earth economy with a new kind of grounding and understanding, bringing science and ethics together.”
—Nina Leopold Bradley, Director, The Aldo Leopold Foundation

“This book is a blessing. Basing their ideas on the fundamentals of the way the earth actually works, Brown and Garver lead us on pathways of respect toward a mutual flourishing of humans and nature. We humans can elect an abundant future rather than devouring the livelihood of our grandchildren as current economics demand.”
—Paul Heltne, Director, Center for Humans and Nature

“This is a book for our times. It offers a blueprint for the way for- ward out of the ecological and economic upheavals wreaked by the relentless pursuit of economic expansion. As we consider the prospect for humanity’s ability to avoid catastrophic change to earth’s life support-systems and achieve economic and social stability, the authors’ proposals for a new global governance framework, including a global reserve, are spot on.”
—Janine Ferretti, Chief of Environment Division, Inter-American Development Bank, and former Executive Director, North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation

“A just, resilient, and secure future for the earth and its habitants will require a shift in human values and a sense of shared responsibility for finding ways to live within ecological limits. Right Relationship provides clear analysis and provocative solutions that should resonate with all who seek an economy that reverses course from its current dangerous trajectory.”
—Adam Koniuszewski, Chief Operating Officer, Green Cross International

“How is the international community going to solve the dilemma of relying on economic growth as the answer to poverty in the world, even though it is clear that ecological pressures due to un- limited growth are already severe and accelerating? Right Relationship provides a thoughtful set of options for creating an economy built on new answers to this pressing problem.”
—Sheila Abed, Chair, International Union for the Conservation of Nature Commission on Environmental Law, and founder and Executive Director, Paraguayan Environmental Law and Economics Institute
PETER G. BROWN is a professor in the School of Environment, the Department of Geography, and the Department of Natural Resource Sciences at McGill University. Before going to McGill, he was Professor of Public Policy at the University of Maryland’s graduate School of Public Affairs; while at Maryland he founded the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, and the School of Public Policy itself,
and also established the School’s Environmental Policy Programs. He is a graduate of Haverford College, and holds a master’s degree in the philosophy of religion from Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University, and a Ph.D. from Columbia in philosophy.
GEOFFREY GARVER is an environmental con- sultant and lecturer in law in Montreal. From 2000 to 2007, he was a senior official at the North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation (www.cec.org), directing the unit that publishes detailed factual investigations of complaints by North American citizens that one of the NAFTA countries—Mexico, the United States, and Canada—is failing to effectively en-
force its environmental law. At the CEC, he wrote reports on enforcement of laws on water pollution from Canadian pulp and paper mills, harm to fish habitat from logging in British Columbia, and the killing of migratory birds by timber harvesting in the United States. Previously, he spent nine years with the U.S. Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division, first as a trial attorney and then as an acting assistant chief handling cases dealing with land and natural resource management, water rights, and environmental impact assessment. Some of his major cases concerned the Everglades’ water quality, winter use and bison management in Yellowstone National Park, and water rights in Idaho and Oregon.Moving from Wrong to Right Relationship

“BEARING WITNESS” IS THE Quaker term for living life in a way that reflects fundamental truths. Bearing witness is about getting relationships right. The group of Quakers in the eighteenth century who built a movement to end slavery were bearing witness to the truth that slavery was wrong. Yet bearing witness to right relationships is not limited to Quakers. It is something done by inspired people of all faiths and cultures when they live life according to cherished values built on caring for other people and being stewards of the earth’s gifts. The mass movement to end apartheid in South Africa, Rachel Carson’s triggering of the environmental movement in the 1960s, and the campaign of Mothers Against Drunk Driving to make roads safer are just a few examples of people coming together to bear witness to what they knew was right.

The global economy today is overwhelming the ability of the earth to maintain life’s abundance. We are getting something terribly wrong. At this critical time in history, we need to reorient ourselves in how we relate to each other and to the earth’s wonders through the economy. We need a new mass movement that bears witness to a right way of living on our finite, life-giving planet.

Right Relationship

Over just the last two decades, science has radically altered its view of the arrangement both of life and of nonliving components of the earth. New understandings are emerging that place relationship at the center. Biology and physics are moving away from a “reductionist” view of function, in which the activity of a living cell or an ecosystem, for example, is explained by being reduced to its parts, rather than including the relationship between those parts as essential to our understanding. Today scientists are admitting that this three-hundred-year-old scientific doctrine is far too simplistic, and are finding that physical substances work and exist in terms of highly complex, interdependent, and changeable contexts and relationships. So, for example, the relationships between genes in the human body, rather than only their individual functions, are the key to the countless ways that human genes can produce genetic traits and characteristics. We are now learning that relationship is the key to the survival of our species on the social and political level, as well. This book, then, is about relationship writ large, and about how to move to right relationship from wrong relationship in our individual and collective economic lives.

A quick story of one set of relationships operating on our planet helps illustrate this more sophisticated scientific understanding. In its natural state, oil, created over eons from organic matter by volcanic heat and compression, is found almost entirely within the earth’s crust; that is its natural relationship with the planet. By the same token, most forms of life can only exist within the biosphere; the thin membrane of plants, animals, and microorganisms and their life support systems at or near the earth’s surface constitutes habitat for virtually all life. Life on earth also exists in a spatial relationship to the atmosphere, which must contain gases also arranged in a particular relationship—not too much carbon dioxide, plenty of nitrogen and oxygen, only minute amounts of other gases. Finally, all life forms need access to a highly particular relationship between only two simple and very plentiful gases: hydrogen and oxygen. Water, so necessary to life, is in fact a relationship between those two gases. It is also found primarily on top of the earth’s crust or only a short distance beneath it or in the atmosphere above it. These relationships can equally easily be discerned to be “wrong” if the spatial configuration of each component is seriously disturbed, just as a gene sequence cannot express itself if it does not have the necessary position in the genome and the necessary relationship with certain proteins.

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Right now, one of the largest industrial projects in the planet’s history is located in western Canada. Development of the Alberta tar sands is a massive attempt to alter the relationships of the substances normally found below the earth with those on it. In this case, oil is brought from beneath the crust along with the sand it permeates and placed in relationship to the ecosystems found on the surface: forests, rivers, wetlands, and lakes. Once on the surface, the oil enters into a relatively permanent set of new relationships with air and water, both in Alberta where it is mined, and also when it is used in vehicles and heating plants in the chain of refineries and users that spread out from it, as far west as China and as far south as Texas. The immense Athabaska River, adapted over millennia and nourishing the boreal forest, enters into a long-term new set of relationships, too. To flush oil from the sands, the river is drained, boiled, forced through the oil-drenched sands, and then deposited in enormous tailing ponds, where the oil’s poisonous hydrocarbons are supposed to “settle.” The life-giving water of the Athabaska is removed from any use by life forms ever again, barring the discovery of some new, extraordinary technology.

This alteration of relationships transforms the thousands of square miles devoted to tar sands development into a huge, toxic graveyard of former life, with a stench of sulfur and hot asphalt that can be smelled from far away. The surface of the earth is stripped of all animal or plant habitat. In the surrounding area, pus-filled boils, cancers, and other lethal diseases and birth defects in the fish, animal, and human population are now being documented.1 But not only are ecological relationships affected. Tar sands development also affects social relationships among people. Tens of thousands of workers have migrated to the few towns and many work camps on the site. The crime rate in the towns and cities most affected, Fort McMurray and Fort Chipewayan, and Edmonton and Calgary, has risen, as have homelessness, the cost of living, and prostitution. Human casualties from drug use, alcohol, highway accidents, and the rigors of shift work on a frontier are also escalating.

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And these are only the impacts at the beginning of the chain. Once shipped from Alberta, tar sands oil will power air conditioners in deserts, furnaces in the Arctic, and many cars, trucks, and jets. It will serve as the raw material for a vast array of synthetic chemicals and fertilizers. This single industrial project even affects Canada’s international relationships, as it makes the nation’s compliance with emissions reductions in the Kyoto Protocol virtually impossible. Demand for Alberta’s oil will be driven by an international economy that is racing ahead in pursuit of endless growth and wealth accumulation.

Alberta tar sands development, along with many other modern industrial developments such as the Three Gorges dam in China or even the war in Iraq, are clear examples of “wrong relationship.”

In this book we expand the term “right relationship” from its early Quaker use to give it a more universal meaning that includes contemporary science and has roots in diverse cultural and religious traditions. Right relationship provides a guiding ethic for people wishing to lead fulfilling lives as creative and integrated participants in human society and the commonwealth of life as a whole. It is akin to what some would call “sustainability,” though it goes much deeper. Right relationship offers a guidance system for functioning in harmony with scientific reality and enduring ethical traditions.

In the 1940s, conservation biologist Aldo Leopold, reflecting on what he had come to see as the next stage in human moral development, created a useful definition of right relationship. When working out what he called the land ethic, he explained that “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”2 Many volumes have since been written on the philosophy of ecology, but this simple statement has become the touchstone of the ecological worldview. Leopold’s ethic gains strength when enhanced with affirmations of the inherent value of human and other life, as exemplified in Albert Schweitzer’s powerful idea of “reverence for life.”3

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Replacing the term “stability” with “resilience” reflects the current scientific understanding of relationships. Leopold’s ethic applies, as well, to the integrity, resilience, and beauty of human communities. How the ethic is understood in practice depends, of course, on the type of community. Hence, with only one alteration, his ethic becomes a practical guide for differentiating between right and wrong relationship both in human society and in the entire community of life of which humans are a part: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, resilience, and beauty of the commonwealth of life. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, resilience, and beauty of the commonwealth of life. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.

It is quite possible to choose right relationships and the common good. Many individuals are already doing so, as are many communities and a few societies. The problem the world is currently facing, however, is that in most of our modern societies the majority of people are actively urged, even forced, to choose wrong relationships, such as those typified by the Alberta tar sands project. Greed and the constant stimulation of new desires that feed it, until quite recently regarded in most societies as sinful or at least unpleasant, have increasingly become acceptable, even glorified. Simultaneously, modern industrial activity has embraced a pathological gigantism, increasing corporate consolidations and ruthlessly crushing the small-business players, as well as the natural systems on which all economic activity depends.

In short, a pursuit of wrong relationships is the prevailing trend of our times. The signs are now well known: climate change, overpopulation, loss of topsoil and fresh water, increasing rates of species extinction, deforestation, imperiled coral reefs, unstoppable invasive species, toxic chemicals that remain for eons in the environment, persistent human poverty and hunger, and an increasingly inflated, unstable world financial system and globalizing economy. And we only begin the list.

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Right relationship with life and the world is both a personal and a collective choice, but it is a choice that we must make. It can support and inspire people struggling to find a foundational base for the development of productive societies and a healthy human–earth relationship. Opting for healthy human and ecological communities is a decision we can make that will require us to find new ways to live and to run our economies. Of course, “right relationship” is simply another way of expressing similar precepts found in many of the world’s religious and spiritual traditions. The reductionist science of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries transformed ethical ideas by removing, for many people, their theological foundations. Now, the relationship science of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries is beginning to change human perceptions of reality, particularly in terms of human duties to the other life forms with which we share life’s prospect.



The Commonwealth of Life

To move from wrong to right relationship, we need to answer the question: related to what? To answer this question we have chosen a term that stresses interdependence—commonwealth. It is typically used to describe a political community established to promote the common good, rather than only the interests of individuals or a particular class of people. Political commonwealths derive from the roots of the word: “common” and “wealth”—that is, wealth is seen as something to be allocated equitably in society, to be shared in common.

The traditional idea of a commonwealth stresses the shared features of the community and interdependence of its members. For people, relationships with other humans or with natural communities bring in notions of mutual respect and fairness that are reflected, for example, in universally recognized moral principles like the Golden Rule. The commonwealth of life extends these notions of common features, fair sharing, and interdependence to the entire community of living beings on the earth. The “common wealth” in this community of life on the earth is now clearly the evolutionary heritage and destiny that people share with other life forms. A whole earth economy works for all of life’s commonwealth. Hence the subtitle of this book.

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Nearly all life on the earth has been made possible by the power of the sun, which over eons has fueled the creation of living structures of increasing complexity and interdependence. These range from single-cell organisms to elephant, honeybee, or human societies, as well as the intertwined communities of plants, animals, insects, and other biota that constitute a forest. In the commonwealth of all life, the actions of each individual member or species affect the entire commonwealth, however small the result might be. We human beings are now in a position to have far greater impact on the commonwealth of life than most of the other life forms with which we share the planet. Therefore we have the responsibility and privilege to consider other beings and ecosystems when we engage in any sort of social action, including an economy. Our actions must embody an ethic of appreciating, husbanding, and sharing the earth’s bounty.



An Economy in Right Relationship

Our species has arrived at its present precarious condition through a history of development driven, in part, by economic relationships and interactions. But though it has facilitated convenience in material living over the centuries, building and maintaining human societies has often had disastrous effects on human and natural communities—the ruin of the Mayan, Roman, and Easter Island civilizations are examples. By objective measures, the kind of globalized economy that has seized the world since World War II is one of the most disastrous of all. Many of the earth’s key life-support systems are in rapid decline.4 Far more catastrophic collapses are likely to hit human and ecological communities in the near future, and the long-run prospect is dire indeed unless a shift from wrong to right relationships becomes part of human culture.

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The postwar financial success of a globalized economy has led to the continuing expansion of finance and consumption and to prosperity for hundreds of millions of people, but it has also trapped the nations of the world in a relentless pursuit of economic growth with no thermostat or shutoff valve. Especially since the end of the Cold War and the easing of any threat of a competing ideology, an increasingly unregulated global capitalistic economy, as developed most enthusiastically in the United States, has dismantled decades-old institutions and structures that had previously succeeded at more evenly distributing prosperity and reducing market abuses.5

The current system operates on the assumption that the earth’s environment is a subset of the human economy, and that the earth belongs to humans. If these are the assumptions, it makes sense to transfer as much of the earth’s natural capital as possible into the engines of the industrial economy. These assumptions, though, are fantastically at odds with scientific reality; human culture and its economic goals are, in pure scientific fact, a subset of the earth’s environment and resources, and humanity is only one of millions of species that depend on them. Like putting water into the tar sands, placing the human economy above the well-being of the natural world creates a lethal, poisonous wrong relationship. So how can people shift from an economy based on greed and unquestioned growth to a whole earth economy that is based on right relationship with the commonwealth of life?

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Five Questions in Search of Right Relationship

Five key questions, and their answers, chart a path to putting the economy in right relationship with life’s commonwealth:

What is the economy for?
How does it work?
How big is too big?
What is fair?
How should it be governed?
The balance of this introduction offers an analysis of each question, with a summary of the “wrong relationship” problem to be solved and a preview of answers based on right relationship.



Question #1: What is the economy for?

What are people aiming for, individually and collectively, in the myriad interdependent transactions that make up the economy? Most leaders in finance, business, government, and think tanks say that the global economy’s purpose is to enhance human well-being by constantly maintaining economic growth. They assume, despite having little or no serious argument or data, that more consumption and economic activity will result in greater well-being.

Yet this answer makes no sense. To begin with, in mainstream economic terms, growth is not measured in terms of benefits, but simply keeps track of overall economic activity in terms of exchanges of money. Many such exchanges create negative side effects, such as pollution, but money spent on cleaning up the resulting pollution is measured as positive growth—and hence adds to dominant measures like Gross Domestic Product (GDP). So, for example, the current economic model sees the money spent cleaning up the Exxon Valdez oil spill as an increase in GDP and therefore beneficial. Similarly, when a person suffers a fatal car accident, the economic exchanges, in terms of ambulances, insurance agents, funeral homes, and so forth, increase GDP and are seen as positive.

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The current purpose of the economy—providing ever-increasing wealth, with ever-increasing growth—means that cash incomes can rise while actual wealth falls, as measured by natural capital such as soil, timber, oil reserves, and clean water. Making money often demands the one-time, windfall liquidation of centuries-old natural support systems such as forests or fisheries, or even older works of nature such as the Canadian tar sands.

In addition, GDP growth contains no measure of distribution, so inequity, poverty, and outright starvation often can, and do, rise at the same time that overall economic activity increases.

Lastly, many studies worldwide have demonstrated that after certain basic needs are met, it is one’s relative wealth—how folks compare to others, not an absolute amount of wealth accumulation— that determines much of the self-perception of happiness. In “advanced” (or, perhaps, “overdeveloped”) societies, trying to improve well-being and happiness through growth is folly on a treadmill, since people cannot all be wealthier than each other.

These problems are symptoms of an economy in wrong relationship. Right relationship, by contrast, is built, in large part, on respect for all life—the kind of respect that is inherent in the Golden Rule, fair play, and other ethical principles that people from across the world’s religions and cultures learn as children. Once the economy is understood as being embedded in the living, dynamic world that surrounds it, its purposes become clear: that is, to maintain the integrity, resilience, and beauty of life’s commonwealth. The human economy is our way of provisioning ourselves. Hence for humans this means providing for the well-being of individual people, households, communities, and nations. It also means providing for the health and vitality of the finite ecological community in which we live—our diverse and finite earth. Moving away from an economy based on wrong relationships does not spell economic doom. Rather, it creates opportunities for truly rich and fulfilling lives for all.

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Question #2: How does the economy work?

The prevailing way of thinking about how the economy works