It’s not such a long step from the anti-slavery campaigning of 18th century British Quakers to a book urging changes in the way we fashion our economy in the 21st century. In Peter Brown’s and Geoffrey Carver’s Right Relationship: Building a Whole Earth Economy a group of American Quakers take inspiration from their forbears who were deeply convinced that slavery was a wrong relationship between humans and that they should take action to put it right. The campaign eventually prevailed against entrenched interests and a widespread acceptance of the economic necessity for slavery.
The right relationship this contemporary group is campaigning for is with the whole commonwealth of life, not only the human part of it. The commonwealth of life is a concept central to the book. It stresses the interdependence of the entire community of living beings on the earth. It is the evolutionary heritage and destiny that people share with other life forms.
The book throughout encourages reflection on the scientific understandings of how life systems on earth work. Right relationship as an ethic grows out of science. We now know that the energy that flows from the sun to the earth makes possible virtually all life in all its forms and activities. Evolutionary theory explains the increasing complexity of life and has been expanded to include the idea that evolving life on earth is an agent of change of the planet itself, creating and modulating “the presence of water, the composition of the atmosphere, the characteristics of the oceans, and the very rock of ages on which everything stands.” Although entropy drives a natural tendency to dissipate energy and increase disorder, living organisms and ecosystems move towards complexity as they harness the steady flow of energy from the sun. Biodiversity holds life together. Our present economy is engaged in what is in effect an ecological holocaust when the complex systems that life builds are being dismantled faster than they are being put together.
Placing the human economy above the well-being of the natural world creates a lethal, poisonous wrong relationship. This is horrifyingly illustrated in the book’s opening description of the Alberta tar sands project, surely one of the most destructive industrial undertakings the planet has seen.
We don’t have to do this. There are other choices open to us in building an economy that enhances life’s prospects rather than degrading them. The book argues that we must move to an economy which preserves the integrity, resilience and beauty of the commonwealth of life. The book wants to see respect and reciprocity at the heart of the economy. These are crushed when an economy encourages the amassing of wealth and rewards greed, all in the name of more indiscriminate growth. Yet respect and reciprocity are fundamentally persistent in human life, as the great religions and the wisdom of many indigenous ciultures attest. The book’s attention to an emerging integration of science, religion and ethics is relevant. “Science is creating a narrative of relationship with regard to the earth and its natural environment that is touching the human spirit and enlarging the human sense of morality and ethics. Religion in the West…is becoming more open to new understandings and to inclusion of scientific discoveries…” Teilhard de Chardin, the Dalai Lama and the American biologist E.O. Wilson are among those mentioned here. In relation to ethics it was interesting for me to see Albert Schweitzer’s “reverence for life” philosophy given recognition for its pioneering vision. I was much impressed by his thinking in my far off student days.
But if the book has a strong philosophical basis it also engages with the practicalities. Detailed attention, for example, is given to new international governance regimes which the authors consider will be needed as we move towards an economy in right relationship with the earth’s life systems. They tentatively propose four institutions: a Global Reserve charged with understanding how the economy works within the ecosphere; Trusteeships of Earth’s Commons to translate into management measures the information on ecological limits developed in the Global Reserve; a Global Federation perhaps along the lines of the European Union; and a Global Court to prevent abuse of power of global agencies and to hear cases of enforcement of global rules.
Does it all sound a long way away from the way we do things now? Wishful thinking? Maybe. The authorsthemselves acknowledge that there are question marks over whether we will in fact make the changes needed to build a whole earth economy. But they are campaigners. What we are doing in our economy is wrong and must be put right. Power elites will resist this message, as they did in the days of the slave trade. They must be countered by high quality evidence on the ecological threats inherent in our present economy; the consequences of endless growth must be presented to the public with complete honesty. Non-violent means, as one would expect from Quakers, but persistent and urgent none the less.
