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Capitalism As If The World Matters - new edition launched

Imogen Martineau, October 22nd, Forum founders

Jonathon Porritt, our founder director, outlines developments in the two years since Capitalism As If The World Matters first appeared, and what these mean for today's leaders:

"2007: the atmosphere warms up; the forests crash down; the poor of the world go on getting poorer; water resources in more than 30 countries are running dry; fish stocks decline; an additional 73 million people join the human race; 800 million go hungry while a billion get fat. Just an average year in the life of planet Earth. And still we wait for today’s political “leaders” to begin to get their act together.

This is not a question of disputed science. Even on climate change, the consensus is now overwhelming. Neither it is a question of money. The rich world squanders countless billions of dollars of tax payers money on subsidising life-destroying industries year in, year out. Instead, it is a question of fear and lack of political vision.

Politicians are fearful because they don’t believe the answers can be found within a capitalist framework. And they know they won’t get elected unless they go on offering voters the same kind of “get rich quick, party on politics” that has dominated our lives for the last 50 years.

Whether capitalism really is capable of delivering a genuinely sustainable, equitable economy is by no means clear. But it had better be. It is the only game in town, and will be for many years to come. Precisely those years during which we have to take urgent, radical action to halt the current pattern of damage to the planet and our communities.

Capitalism As If The World Matters is all about confronting that all but unspoken crisis in our political systems. Without inspirational and utterly transparent political leadership, the beneficiaries of today’s feel-good societies will go on thinking that they can go on forever.

Since the first edition of “Capitalism” came out two years ago, its basic thrust has been warmly received by business leaders, academics and campaigners. This edition has been substantially updated, with extended analysis of what is happening in China and the United States (on which two countries our future prospects almost entirely depend), a whole raft of new case studies from the business world, and a deeper treatment of some of the security issues that have such a profound effect on people’s lives.

It also continues to raise difficult questions for the environment movement to address as it struggles to make its voice heard beyond the “already converted” and broadly sympathetic.

Change will not come by threatening people with yet more ecological doom and gloom. The necessary changes have also to be seen as desirable changes: good for people, their health and their quality of life – and not just good for the prospects of future generations. This is a ‘here and now’ agenda, as well as an agenda for tomorrow.

This means working with the grain of markets and free choice, not against it. It means embracing capitalism as the only overarching system capable of achieving any kind of reconciliation between ecological sustainability, on the one hand, and the pursuit of prosperity and personal wellbeing on the other.

That said, today’s particular model of capitalism is clearly incapable of delivering this kind of reconciliation, dependent as it is upon the accelerating liquidation of the natural capital upon which we depend and upon worsening divides between the rich and the poor worldwide.

At its heart, therefore, sustainable development comes right down to one all-important challenge: is it possible to conceptualize and then operationalize an alternative model of capitalism – one that allows for the sustainable management of the different capital assets upon which we rely so that the yield from those different assets sustains us now, as well as in the future?

The case for sustainable development must be reframed if that is to happen. It must be as much about new opportunities for responsible wealth creation as about outlawing irresponsible wealth creation; it must draw upon a core of ideas and values that speaks directly to people’s desire for a higher quality of life, emphasizing enlightened self-interest and personal wellbeing of a different kind.

It is only this combination (sustainable development perceived as answering the unavoidable challenge of living within natural limits, providing unprecedented opportunities for responsible and innovative wealth creators, and offering people a more equitable and more rewarding way of life) that is likely to provide any serious political alternative to today’s economic and political orthodoxy.

Unless it throws in its lot with this kind of progressive political agenda, conventional environmentalism will continue to decline.

All things considered, what is the alternative anyway? If not genuinely sustainable development, then what? And if not now, when?"

The paperback of Capitalism As If The World Matters is available from the Earthscan website

Reviews

"The book is challenging, passionate and, ultimately, optimistic." Grist, September 2007

"A profoundly important book and one that, by rights, should change the world..." Ethical Junction, October 2007

China junkie

Jonathon Porritt, November 27th, Forum founders

I have become a bit of a China junkie. China looms so large in today’s sustainability debates, and the challenges that it faces are so “real time, right now”, that it makes any other country’s dilemmas look small by comparison.

So to be part of two high-level presentations from Chinese scientists in one week – one on energy issues and one on water issues – has been quite a fix.

The energy stuff has become pretty familiar. One new coal-fired power station a week (though you never hear about how many power stations they are closing down), two new nuclear reactors a year (the fastest ever nuclear build programme), vast new investments in renewables (wind, PV, hydro etc) and serious efforts (at long last!) to push energy efficiency throughout the economy.

But for China, it’s water that really matters, and the situation here is seriously gloomy. 60% of China’s rivers are seriously polluted; 28% of them are judged to be “completely useless”; 20% of drinking water fails to meet minimum standards; almost every one of China’s fresh water lakes is heavily polluted by agricultural and detergent run-off, leading to massive algal blooms; 80% of discharges to sea are illegal, with huge “dead zones” stretching up and down the coast; at least 10 million hectares of land have been seriously contaminated by the run-off of toxic chemicals and heavy metals – and I could go on!

The damage to China’s economy is just massive – as was eloquently recognised by President Hu Jintau in his recent speech to the Party Congress. And there are good political reasons for trying to get on top of the water challenge: there are literally tens of thousands of civil protests every year around China, many of them relating directly to the pollution and misuse of water.

So the Chinese Government is starting to crack down on polluters (including the 250 multinational companies based in China), to charge much more realistic prices for the use of water, and to build hundreds of Sewage Treatment Works.

Given the horrific legacy the country faces, after decades of systematic abuse of the water environment as it became the “workshop to the world”, it’s going to take decades to get it all sorted. At precisely the point when accelerating climate change is going to make it all that much harder.

To read more from Jonathon's blog, visit www.jonathonporritt.com

_{Image: Shanghai at Sunrise}

Loony vs. mainstream

Jonathon Porritt, February 12th, Forum founders

Politicians must be finding it harder and harder to work out in the wider sustainability agenda what still falls in the ‘loony’ category (as climate change once did) and what now falls in the ‘emerging and increasingly mainstream’ category – which they better get their heads around for fear of appearing out of touch.

The speed with which issues move from the former to the latter must be mind-boggling for them, persuaded as most of them still are that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with today’s model of ‘progress through growth’ that can’t be sorted out by a few timely touches on the tiller. Bless!

For instance, only a couple of years ago, if you so much as mentioned the need for Ministers and officials to think much more seriously about ‘food security’ (in other words, how this nation will secure access to enough food of the right kind at the right price in the future), you were definitely consigned to the loony category.

Indeed, Defra and Treasury combined forces in 2005 to produce a ‘Vision’ for the Common Agricultural Policy which oozed contempt for any such lame-brain recidivism: food security may have been a big deal after the Second World War (when the Common Agricultural Policy became our principal response), but today’s global food industry is deemed to be totally immune to any such pressures.

It all looks very different now – and although Treasury is unlikely to be found giving voice to such an heretical concept, Defra is beginning to think much more seriously about food security. This may have something to do with the highest-ever recorded rises in the price of food in 2007, or the fact that prices in various food commodity futures markets are climbing higher and higher, or that food imports into China are rising every year, or that harvests around the world are being seriously impacted by extreme weather conditions (which you may or may not link directly to climate change, depending on how cautious you are in pointing out cause and effect in such phenomena), and that ill-thought-out strategies for converting land to produce biofuels rather than food are already having an effect on food prices in different parts of the world.

So watch out for further developments on this front within Defra – if not in Treasury, or even in the FCO, where David Miliband has just junked sustainable development as one of the Foreign Office’s over-arching objectives. But more on that later!

To read more from Jonathon's blog, visit www.jonathonporritt.com

The i-team is up and running

Fiona Bennie, April 25th, Forum founders

At last, the i-team project has launched with the annoucement that three local authorities will be put through the innovation process.

I’m really pleased we've chosen such a diverse selection of local authorities - Kirklees, St Helens and Suffolk Councils -to take part, and we're hoping to get started with our first creative workshop as soon as possible.

Working with IDEO always promises a variety of interactive activities and some really cool methods for idea generation, so I’m looking forward to a fun and engaging first workshop. Watch this space!

Last places available for Reconnections 2008

Joy Green, April 28th, Forum founders

Reconnections 2008 will be held from 16th - 20th June. It's a unique residential course led by Jonathon Porritt that provides the space to reconnect with the natural world, with a group of people on the same sort of journey and with the kind of rigorous analysis and debate that is the hallmark of people who care passionately about ideas and values.

Reconnections provides a rare opportunity to step away from the day to day tasks at the office and really engage with the bigger questions about what you're doing, why and how. It often marks a giant leap forwards in participants' professional and personal lives.

The last few places on this years course are available. Download a registration form here, or contact Mel Trievnor at m.trievnor@forumforthefuture.org.uk for more information.

Good news week

Jonathon Porritt, May 1st, Forum founders

It’s a bit gloomy out there at the moment: climate change, food shortages, very high oil prices, the credit crunch, impending recession – little wonder that people are beginning to look as downcast as our Prime Minister must be feeling.

Against the odds, however, last week was stuffed to the gills with good news as far as I was concerned. To start with, I spoke at a conference organised by a little office supplies company in Cheltenham (called The Commercial Group), where more than 250 other small businesses were regaled with what is one of the most inspiring case studies of a company going from almost nowhere to being a serious player in just 2 years. They also heard from the redoubtable Eugenie Harvey, of “Save the World for a Fiver” fame, who I reckon could cheer up even Jim Lovelock in his gloomiest “Death of Gaia” moments.

Then I went to open a state-of-the-art new building near Stroud, where a group of companies collectively known as The Green Shop Group are being re-housed. “If you want to change the world, you must begin from where you are”, says Roger Budgeon, Founder of The Green Shop, and the modest, unassuming inspiration behind this amazing initiative. Check it out – and if you have ever despaired at getting alternative building and DIY products, I guarantee that you’ll find them there.

At the start of the week, the 2008 Queen’s Awards for Enterprise were announced and included in the Sustainable Development category are two of the outstanding exemplars of year-on-year corporate excellence on all things sustainable (namely, Wessex Water and BT), as well as (somewhat less predictably!) Permanent Publications, publisher of the wonderful Permaculture Magazine, which was launched in the UK in 1992 with a reach of just 600 people, and now has more than 100,000 readers all over the world.

And lastly, sitting on a train checking emails, I found myself bursting out with laughter at an email from my colleagues on the South West Regional Development Agency, informing us that no less a global figure than George Bush had explicitly name-checked a big wave project the RDA is investing in off the coast of Cornwall, called Wave Hub. My cup positively overflowed at the knowledge that even George is now out there routing for renewable energy schemes in places he’s probably never even heard of!

_{Image: artist's impression of the Wave Hub in Cornwall, by www.ind-art.co.uk}

Read more from Jonathon Porritt's blog at www.jonathonporritt.com

Food security

Jonathon Porritt, May 13th, Forum founders

Forum for the Future is running an event for some of our partners in the built environment almost exactly one year on from this time last year. I’ve just reviewed the stuff we shoved at them a year ago – on climate change, energy security, peak oil, spatial planning, inequality, prospects for economic growth, and so on – and it’s quite mind-boggling to see how much the world has changed in the last year! And because the focus is on the built environment, I didn’t even mention things like food security which has “suddenly” soared up the global agenda.

I put ‘suddenly’ in those ironic speech marks simply because one of the most shocking things to have emerged in all the panic calls uttered recently by the UN and others is the degree to which this current crisis has been predicted by experts time after time – as politicians disregarded global food agendas, and research budgets were cut and cut again in the times of plenty.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has now summoned world leaders to an emergency summit in June, and set up a new Taskforce to put forward ways of dealing with the crisis. The World Food Programme has said it needs to find an additional $750 million to cope with the combination of growing numbers of people in need and rapidly rising food prices.

So, food security is back on the political agenda. Climate change is omni-present. Peak Oil is rising. The credit crunch is the new player on the block. Resource wars are looming. Rainforest destruction just won’t go away. Species loss is as bad as ever, but no one cares – for now. Water shortages are chronic.

But much, much more worrying are the linkages between all these notionally “separate” phenomena. The synergies, feedback loops, interdependencies. At long last, people are starting to make the connections – and are even beginning to link all those separate symptoms back to their root cause: today’s literally insane notion of getting richer by trashing the planet and screwing the poor.

Don’t hold your breath, but pretty soon you might even hear one or two of them start talking about population. And then you’ll know revolution is on the way.

You can read more from Jonathon Porritt's blog at www.jonathonporritt.com

Fuel Tax Protests

Jonathon Porritt, June 2nd, Forum founders

This all feels very much like one of those periodic crunch moments for the sustainability agenda. Fuel-tax protests. Rebellious backbenchers. The kind of febrile atmosphere we last saw in 2000. The Tory press on the war path. NGOs winding themselves up: “Stay green, Gordon, don’t be yellow”.

In 2000, the price of fuel was heading sharply upwards – not as sharply as today, but very uncomfortably. A motley consortium of some of the worst affected citizens (road haulage firms, farmers etc) took to their trucks and their tractors and blockaded key oil facilities in protest against the fuel tax escalator – a Conservative innovation which Labour was quite happily rolling on with. Within a few weeks, the Treasury caved in and agreed to decommission the escalator.

On the face of it, a minor blip. But a strong case has been made since then that it was this one setback that put paid to Treasury’s enthusiasm for the sustainability agenda. Ministers blamed both NGOs for not having come to their aid and the media for having hyped the whole thing into a massive crisis. The image of ‘Mondeo Man’, feral and unforgiving, was on display, virtually, the length and breadth of the Treasury’s corridors of impotence.

Roll forward eight years. It’s all stacking up again, with campaigns both to defer the projected increase in fuel taxes for the second time, and to reverse decisions announced in the budget on increases and vehicle excise duty. Ministers are ‘listening’; U-turns are widely anticipated.

And would that be so awful? Focussing for now on fuel taxes, just stand back for a moment. The essence of using fiscal instruments to change corporate and consumer behaviour relies on three things: transparency (so that people know what’s coming down the track at them); fiscal neutrality (so as not to piss everyone off by using green taxes primarily to increase revenues); and fairness (so that the less well-off in society are not further disadvantaged).

On those three counts, given the dramatic increases in the price of petrol and diesel over the last couple of years, everyone has been taken by surprise by the price hikes, apart from ‘Peak Oil’ campaigners (who have been telling us this was about to happen for years).

Moreover, the less well-off are being disproportionately hammered, and the hikes in fuel taxes are far from fiscally neutral and never have been.

So, economically, socially, ethically, what are the implications of all that?

Your thoughts really welcome.

Read more from Jonathon Porritt's blog at www.jonathonporritt.com

Population growth not being addressed

Jonathon Porritt, June 9th, Forum founders

I was able to give the ‘population pot’ a pretty good stir on Friday in an event for the Cheltenham Science Festival.

For some time now, I have been reflecting on the way in which the world is responding to the twin crises of HIV/AIDS and continuing high levels of population growth. The UN body responsible for coordinating HIV/AIDS has called for funding to grow to around $22 billion per annum – and it seems probable that governments, donor agencies and big foundations will respond positively.

By contrast, funding for family planning peaked some time ago (as a percentage of total expenditures on population-related activities), and is still on a downward curve.

Donor Expenditures 1995 1999 2004
Family Planning Services 55% 37% 9%
Reproductive Health Services 18% 30% 25%
HIV/AIDS Activities 9% 23% 54%
Research & Development 18% 11% 12%
Millions in Current US $ 1314 1655 4907

HIV/AIDS kills about 8000 people a month, and there are 5 million new infections every year, so I have no problem about the scale of expenditure in addressing this. However, along with many others, I do have major reservations about the way in which the sums are being invested, especially in terms of the US-driven programmes which are much more ideology-based than evidence-based.

But the fact that this year in Kenya (where the rate of population growth is on the rise again) a sum of around 480 million will be spent on HIV/AIDS, compared to just 7.7 million on family planning and reproductive health, is just completely bonkers. What that means is instead of Kenya’s population stabilising at 44 million by 2050, which is what would have happened with the Total Fertility Rate continuing to decline, it could now go as high as 80 million – and god knows how many of that vastly expanded population will have died of HIV/AIDS between now and 2050.

The additional suffering that all this imposes on some of the world’s most poorest countries is literally incalculable. Continuing population growth is already having a marked impact on the efforts being made to meet the Millennium Development Goals. As the All Party Parliamentary Group on Population, Development & Reproductive Health put it in 2007:

“The evidence is overwhelming: the Millennium Development Goals are difficult or impossible to achieve with the current levels of population growth in the least developed countries and regions”.

It’s still the case that most “progressive” development experts think that “addressing poverty first” remains the best response, and that most environmentalists, in a reprehensibly politically-correct way, think it is exclusively about over-consumption in the rich world, than over-population in the poor world.

But exactly what kind of world are these people living in? Certainly not in a world where water consumption is doubling every 20 years, more than twice the rate of human population growth, where available arable land continues to decline year on year, where many of the world’s biodiversity hotspots are increasingly at risk specifically because of rapid population growth, where oil at $139 a barrel is already having a devastating effect on hundreds of millions of very poor people, and where accelerating climate change and rising sea levels are going to cause havoc over the next 20-30 years.

That’s our world – not some make believe cornucopian world that some still dream of, where the number of people on it is of no material significance.

Protecting the rainforests

Jonathon Porritt, June 11th, Forum founders

I long ago swore that I would avoid all big UN Conferences on environment or climate change issues, and have pretty much stuck to that sanity-protecting rule. Indeed, John Prescott got very grumpy with me when I declined the opportunity to be part of the UK delegation at the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. But he was almost always grumpy with me, so it didn’t matter too much.

The only downside to this self-imposed embargo on all such jamborees is that one undoubtedly misses out on those rare moments of drama that almost (but not quite!) compensate for the hours spent in such soul-crushing misery.

One such moment occurred right at the end of the Bali Conference on Climate Change last year. By general agreement, Bali was even more of a soul-crusher than most of these Conferences, in part because of the deplorable behaviour of the US delegation that played an out-and-out spoiler from Day One right through into extra time.

With delegates in despair, and some in tears, the country representative from Papua New Guinea (a guy called Kevin Conrad) stood up and told the US delegation either to recognise the overwhelming will of the Conference (and agree to the Bali Declaration) or get out of the Conference Chamber and scuttle back to Washington cloaked in contempt and ignominy. Very high drama! And fortunately, the US did sign up.

So it was quite a treat to meet up with Kevin Conrad at the Cheltenham Science Festival last week. He was talking about some of the really exciting new ideas around the incentivisation for rainforest countries to keep their rainforests intact rather than cutting them down. A simple but powerful idea: the world needs to protect its remaining rainforests (deforestation contributes up to 20% of total CO2 emissions every year), but they are not “our” rainforests – they are part of the resource base of a number of countries that desperately need the income from their forest to help them develop. So we need them in place; they need them logged and sold on.

One solution is therefore to compensate them financially for not cutting the forests down, and there is now a huge amount of effort going in to developing financial instruments to help “reduce emissions from deforestation and degradation” – or REDD, as it’s called. A new report published in the Philosophical Transaction of the Royal Society shows just how much could be achieved here for just a few billion dollars every year. Very challenging stuff.

And that is what Kevin Conrad is now out there doing – building up a growing head of steam around REDD financing.

Unfortunately, there was one big black cloud hanging over Kevin’s presentation – namely, the ongoing destruction of Papua New Guinea’s own forest. Using the latest remote sensing techniques, a team of scientists based at Port Moresby University, has calculated that PNG is logging its forests even faster than Brazil is cutting down the Amazon rainforests. In 2007, an astonishing 1.7% of the entire forest base was cut down – if it continues at that rate, a full 50% will have disappeared by 2021.

To which there was only one response from his audience. Let’s get this REDD stuff up and running before it’s too late.