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My last post discussed Clay Shirky’s essay on Newspapers and the Unthinkable where he had brought up the newspaper industry’s failure to adequately address the revolution at hand that threatens their existence. I guess we could call it the evolution of denial process, or the osterich philosophy. If we ignore the truth for long enough, if we say it’s not happening often enough, then it will all go away and everything will be peachy.

When people within that industry looked out the window and saw what was really happening they were marginalised, labeled extremist or eccentric or just ignored as bothersome. The industry wanted so badly to believe in it’s perpetual right to exist that the mere thought of not existing posed a threat. It was much easier to buy into a fable that the newspaper will live forever in it’s current form than to face a world so dramatically different, regardless of the world outside.

Which brings me to the world of economics that governs the way practically every country operates. The free market is one based on greed where by chance our individual greed makes the most efficient amount of everything at the most efficient price – market equilibrium. My point is that within that premise there is an obvious floor, it’s a greed based paradigm. And we have to ask ourselves how much money is enough money? How much resources are enough resources? Because currently, if you look outside there is another revolution happening. Our world has a water crisis, an ageing crisis, a population crisis, a mass extinction – I mean the economy is a tiny issue in the face of not having edible fish species by 2050.

Think for a minute, when there are no fish species we can eat who will be feeding China? India? We have a limited amount of top soil and are already in water crisis. We have a thin layer of oxygen around the planet. We have only so many trees and krill to process our carbon dioxide. But if you’re looking out that window and suggest that we might have to reassess the real goals of business eventually – you’ll be pushed aside, marginalised and ostracised. We would prefer to buy into the fable that life will go on forever (or even better, let’s put our faith in the End of Days or the Rapture and ditch this planet). People en masse scare the living crap out of me.

When my step daughter reaches my age she will be faced with a world minus the oil, minus the fish, with how many times the population. If famine hasn’t gotten us we’ll be fighting over those last cups of water we didn’t use to wash coal or rain onto cotton plantations. Tell me where any of this is sustainable… please.

Because we’ve all bought into the idea of mass consumption and economic rationalisation so deeply that we are quite happy to grow tomatoes in China, ship them to Italy for canning, and sell them on Australian supermarket shelves for half the price of a local product. That makes perfect economic sense – but no real carbon footprint energy consumption sense AT ALL.

At some point we’ll have to start listening to people who are asking whether our idea of successful business should be about economics AND society. But, hey what would I know. In my ordinary head a system based on greed has to burn down eventually… right?

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 at 3:19 pm and is filed under business, environment, rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.