Antinuclear

Conservative White Males are destroying the planet, and some women are helping them

We are destroying the joint, REneweconomy By Carmen Lawrence on 26 April 2013 The Conversation

Without really knowing what he was saying, Alan Jones was right – we are “destroying the joint”.

Any dispassionate assessment of the state of “the joint”, both the corner we occupy and the planet as a whole, shows that we are making one hell of a mess of it. Increasing consumption and a growing population are accelerating the depletion of our finite resources, including our precious soils. We are polluting our air, land and water, destroying our heritage places and our communities, producing drastic changes to our climate and pushing out other species at an alarming rate. Human distress and inequality are on the rise, despite our increased material wealth. And all the while, most of us seem to be cheerfully – even wilfully – oblivious to the state we’re in.

But the “we” is not women, it’s all of us. And as a matter of record, since most women have not, until recently, occupied significant positions of influence and power, we should be judged less culpable than men.

Given that women are still in a minority in board rooms and executive positions, as well as in politics, I think it’s pretty rich to blame women for the current state of affairs. It’s fair to say that the responsibility for the mess we’re in resides mainly with those who’ve historically made decisions about the way we manage our societies and economies – privileged, powerful, Western white males.

It’s true, however, that many women now in positions of power appear to share the view that the planet’s resources are inexhaustible and that the only serious policy objectives are those which promote economic growth and material acquisition, with little eye to the social and environmental costs.

This was not what women of my generation campaigned for. While we were caught up in a global push to redesign the roles of women and to challenge the many barriers to our full participation in Australian life, many of us we were also impatient with the broader values of our society. It was intrinsic to much of the early feminist debate, that in seeking equality, women were not looking to simply replicate the experience of men. Nor were we enthusiastic about embracing a capitalist ethic which regarded materialism, competition and selfishness as cardinal virtues. We did not think we could – or should – “have it all”.

It is no accident that at the same time as we were questioning the nature of our society and our place in it, we were also beginning to probe our relationship with the natural world and disputing some of the benefits of technology.

In the early 1960s, Rachel Carson released her ground-breaking book Silent Spring. Underpinning Carson’s approach was a strong rejection of consumerism; she placed spiritual values ahead of material ones. Her book was, as much as anything, an attack on the paradigm of material enrichment driven by scientific progress that was so central to post-war American – and Australian – culture. She also had a strong belief that the idea we can control nature is an arrogant one. Silent Spring is often credited with spawning the modern environment movement and has, as a result, been an object of scorn for those, then and now, who see the environment as a limitless sink.

At around the same time, Australian poet Judith Wright, deeply concerned about the increasing destruction of the natural environment and alarmed at the prospect of oil drilling on the Great Barrier Reef, helped found the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland. Wright was very influential in the fledgling movement, encouraging a focus on educating Australians to embrace “a deeper kind of belonging”.

Later, Wright argued that the future of the planet depended on individuals developing a new relationship with nature which would require a “reassertion of the values of feeling against the economic and technological Gradgrinds of our time”.

While there has been a virtual revolution in women’s education and working lives since these women wrote; while our choices have multiplied and we are wealthier than we have ever been, deeper, nagging doubts remain about just how much women’s (and men’s) lives have really improved. I suspect more than a few women question whether some of the objectives we’ve been encouraged to embrace do really contribute to our wellbeing.

Does it actually improve the quality of our lives to spend endless hours at work, depriving ourselves of precious time with friends and family; time for leisure and creativity? Can we justify our ever-increasing consumption while others live in rank poverty and the world’s resources are being depleted at an alarming rate? Have we forgotten the warnings of prescient women like Carson and Wright? Are we paying too steep a price for our materialism?…….

We cannot ignore the fact that high and accelerating levels of economic growth are generating serious problems of resource insecurity, environmental degradation and social dislocation which produce distress and disease: there is a serious downside to growth. One of the reasons policy makers continue to be fixated on increasing growth as a pre-eminent objective in the face of these effects is that they believe there is no alternative. This represents a failure of the imagination by the political class, a refusal to take seriously and develop other possible models which have – somewhat tentatively – been proposed under the heading of steady state or no-growth economics.

Even Robert Solow, who won the Nobel Prize for economics for his work on growth theory, apparently now describes himself as “agnostic” on whether growth can continue and told Harper’s Magazine in March 2008 that, “There is no reason at all why capitalism could not survive without slow or even no growth. I think it’s perfectly possible that economic growth cannot go on at its current rate forever … There is nothing intrinsic in the system that says it cannot exist happily in a stationary state.”

It is surely time for these ideas to be taken seriously so that we – collectively – can stop “destroying the joint”.

This is an edited extract from “We Are Destroying the Joint” by Carmen Lawrence in Destroying the Joint: Why Women Have to Change the World, edited by Jane Caro, published by UQP.  http://reneweconomy.com.au/2013/we-are-destroying-the-joint-environment-consumption-74131

April 26, 2013 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | General News