In its recent verdict in the case of the Great Indian Bustard and climate action the Supreme Court of India has recognized the existence of a fundamental right of all humans to be free from the adverse impacts of climate change. Its verdict has dismayed policymakers and builders of renewable energy infrastructure. They say the judges are setting aside the advice of scientific experts and is delaying the construction of infrastructure for reversing climate change. The honorable Court admits that climate change has brought jurisprudence into unchartered territory. Solutions cannot be found with the same way of thinking that has caused the problem. The existential problem caused by climate change cannot be understood and solved by the prevalent paradigms of capitalist economics and unsystemic science.
Property Rights or Natural Rights
In capitalist economies natural capital is the property of its owner. Kings and landlords owned the land, the water and forests, and all fish and animals within their private estates. They also owned the produce of all human beings who lived and worked on their land as their serfs or their slaves. Owners who stayed on their lands and interacted with the people on it could see their forests and watch their crops grow, and their workers sweat, and sense how the system worked. Absentee landlords did not care. They wanted their profits regardless of the damage to their lands by droughts and floods and sufferings of their workers.
The development of commodity markets, in which animals, farm produce, timber, and minerals could be bought and sold with money and prices determined by traders, converted natural capital into financial capital. Financial markets created a new class of capitalists, even further removed from reality than absentee landlords, who gauge the condition of the world from charts of how prices move in commodity exchanges and stock markets. When labor went off the land into factories, workers were paid for the time they spent in factories and what they produced during that time. Their skills and labor became commodities purchasable for a price by owners of enterprises.
Property rights is an ancient principle of economics and jurisprudence. Human rights were recognized much later with political movements, often violent, to abolish slavery, and to pay fair wages and provide safe working conditions for their workers. Gig work is the 21st century way to convert labor into a commodity again: workers on demand, payment only for the work done, and no social security. Good for business owners, but bad for humans.
Garett Hardin’s theory of the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ underlies the ideology of privatization. The theory is property that belongs to everybody is cared for by nobody. Therefore, the commons must be parceled out to private owners to manage their own pieces efficiently, motivated by a drive to make more profit for themselves. Damage to the global environment which belongs to everybody has become a global scale tragedy of the commons. It cannot be solved by further privatization of property. A new theory of governance is required to obtain the ‘Promise of the Global Commons’.
Unsystemic management of the Commons
Francis Bacon boasted, at the birth of the European Enlightenment in the 17th century, that Science would give humans the power to control unruly nature. Scientific discoveries in Physics, Chemistry, and Biology, have produced powerful tools for exploiting the earth to improve humanity’s material well-being, and technologically advanced nations are envied for the material well-being of their citizens. Over-exploitation has harmed the health of the earth on which all human beings depend for their sustenance. Thus, with technological hubris, humans have destroyed the sustainability of the Planet and harmony among people.
Modern science has broken the complexity of systems into small components. Separate sciences are advanced by experts who know more and more about less and less. They are like the blind experts around the proverbial elephant. None sees the whole reality. Modern medicine has developed marvellous drugs and surgeries to repair different organs of the body. Side-effects of the treatment of one organ make patients worse by harming other organs. Better health requires more generalists who understand the whole person’s body and mind.
Economics broke away from other social sciences in the last century with all going into their specialised silos. Economics focused on the productivity of natural and human resources to increase GDP. Economists know how to increase the material size of an economy but do not know how to improve equity in the economy and sustainability of natural resources along with growth.
Economists, like other scientists, look for causal relationships amongst various forces within a system presuming all are unidirectional. The modern scientific approach cannot understand forces that mutually arise and have circular relationships of cause and effect with each other. Economists who advocate for more GDP first to grow more resources to improve HDI (human development) and environmental sustainability later fail to see that human development and sustainable natural resources are pre-requisites for economic growth and will always be its foundations.
Human beings are a part of Nature’s complex system, along with the soil, water systems, and diverse species of plants, animals, and insects. The well-being of all must be protected for sustainable development. Conservationists who focus on only one part of the system and advocate for more trees, or for the protection of one species like the tiger, are not taking a systemic view of the whole system. And those who want poor people to be cleared out of the commons to protect forests and tigers fail to see that humans are also an integral part of the system. Such scientific solutions for sustainability can be inhumane.
Complex systems can be understood only by listening to many points-of-view. The rule of law and speedy justice makes countries attractive for financial investors and for common citizens. However, investors and citizens have different needs, and therefore different interpretations of law. Good governance and justice for all requires those who govern to continuously listen to the people. Courts and experts within their narrow specialisations cannot create a consensus amongst citizens. Citizens with diverse needs must listen to each other to come to a consensus about the type of society they want to create for themselves.
(Published in Tribune, 24th April 2024)
https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/comment/our-planets-sustainability-at-stake-613860