By

Jack Parsons,

(Lecturer in Social Institutions, Brunel University School of Social Sciences)

Published in ISAM. (Brunel undergraduate newspaper). 16th March. 1972

ISAM. (U/g newspaper). 16th March. 1972


ECO-CONSCIENTIOUSNESS
I was very pleased to see John Hancock’s two ‘Isam’ articles on our environmental problems and not a little daunted when he asked me to contribute a follow-up piece as his analysis was so forthright and his recommendations so sweeping that it is rather difficult to make concrete proposals which do not seem banal or even frivolous. I agree that great, if not revolutionary, changes are required in the whole way of life of the developed counties (the ‘over-developed’ countries ‘as Ehrlich and Ehrlich (1) call them, in contrast to the ‘never-to-be developed’ countries ,but as I see no sign of revolution on the horizon we are left with the problem either of starting one or of trying to make do with gradualism ... at least in the first instance.
 

    Our wealthy societies have to learn to live with, first less economic growth, then with zero growth, possibly even negative growth, and wind up fairly soon in an ecological ‘steady-state’ in which proposed change is carefully assessed and introduced only when it will positively improve the quality of life. This must be measured, by complex indicators going far beyond the usual one: per capita income.
This need not be anything like as traumatic as one might at first expect because economic growth and even increasing personal wealth are by no means unmixed blessings – indeed, it can be argued that ,too much prosperity can be unsettling to a pathological degree. In his great work ‘Suicide’, Durkheim argued:

If therefore industrial and financial crises increase suicides, this is not because they cause poverty, since crises of prosperity have the same result; it is because they are crises, that is, disturbances of the collective order. Every disturbance of equilibrium, even though it achieves great comfort and a heightening of general vitality, is an impulse to voluntary death (p. 246).

    Many people in our society now reject material prosperity as their life goal – the ‘drop-outs’ obviously, but many others who refuse overtime, piecework, promotion and ambition in order to live a quiet life, but in general we seem to have set ourselves an infinite goal, an ever-increasing standard of life for an ever-increasing number of people. Quite apart from problems presented by the facts that these two objectives are mutually exclusive and that the finiteness of the earth and all its resources prevent an ever-increasing material standard of living even for a ,stationary population, Durkhaim raises another difficult question:

how [to] determine the quantity of well-being, comfort, or luxury legitimately to be craved by a human being? Nothing appears in man’s organic [or] psychological constitution which sets a limit to such tendencies.
... our capacity for feeling is an insatiable and bottomless abyss [and] if nothing external restrain[s] this capacity it can only be a source of torment ...Unlimited desires are insatiable by definition and insatiability is rightly considered a sign of morbidity (p. 247).
All man’s pleasure in acting, moving and exerting himself implies the sense that his efforts are not in vain and that by walking he had advanced. However, one does not advance when one walks towards no goal, or – which is the same thing – when [one’s] goat is infinity (p. 248).

    We see from this that not only is it inevitable that economic growth must stop but it is desirable that it should stop for most of those who are not in poverty, relative or absolute. Of course it will not do for us in the West to tell the Indian peasants that their living must be frozen at its present pitiful level – nor yet the old-age pensioners and others in our own society – whilst we toy with the idea of stopping further increases in our vastly higher material standards.
 

    Once we have got rid of the idea that the national cake is going to increase in size every year for ever we shall no longer have an excuse for failing to cut the present cake into equitable slices. At the moment all too many of us ease our consciences with what I call the ‘Crosland fallacy’, the view that the only way to ameliorate poverty and prevent pollution and so forth is to increase productivity so that we shall have more to share out next year – a very comforting philosophy for those getting the thick slices of the cake this year. We already generate sufficient wealth for everyone to have a reasonable living standard in return for a reasonable input of labour, and as environmental constraints build up, the pressures towards equity of distribution will become irresistible – we can reasonably hope to have not merely a prices, profits and wages policy but a work and wealth policy which is more or less universally acceptable because it is seen to be just.
John Stuart Mill put forward what is still the classical analysis of the mania for growthmanship as early as 1848:

    Towards what ultimate point is society tending by its industrial progress? When the programme ceases, in what condition ... will [it] leave mankind? ... The increase of wealth is not boundless, at the end of the progressive state lies the stationary state ... [and] I am inclined to believe that it would be, on the whole a very considerable improvement on our present condition.

    For the benefit of those who would describe this as a ‘stagnant’ society with the implication that as few people want to live in one of these as want to bathe in a stagnant pool, Mill adds:

    It is scarcely necessary to remark that a stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement. There would be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress; as much room for improving the art of living, and much more likelihood of its being improved, when minds ceased to be engrossed by the art of getting on (2).

    This surely should be the environmentalist’s charter for the future and it can be further reinforced by hard economic evidence showing that if all the costs are counted in – the ‘negative externalities’ and ‘negative returns to scale’, to use the jargon of the economist, – then much of what looks like economic gain is in fact economic loss, as E. J. ‘Mishan has demonstrated (3).

    It seems that somehow we have to develop a new ethic – or possibly return to the ethic of an earlier age – one recognising and stressing our absolute dependence upon nature’s bounty and our total incapacity to function above or outside the basic environmental mechanisms, the calcium, nitrogen and hydrologic cycles, for instance. Our quaint idea that modern science land technology can over-ride these fundamental physical and bio-chemical chains was portrayed for what it is as early as the 17th century by the philosopher and pioneer of scientific method, Francis Bacon, in his aphorism: Man may command nature, but only by obeying her.

    As Lynn White (4) has argued, Christianity has played a big part in persuading us to adopt the sledgehammer approach to nature or at least in breaking down the earlier ‘barriers in ‘primitive’ animalistic or pantheistic religions where every tree, plant, and stone had its spirit or Godly component which had to be respected, or at least placated before any environmental change could be wrought.

    Christianity has taken God out of things and made him transcendent, connecting with nature only sporadically by means of revolution, and leaving behind a de-spiritualised environment ripe for unlimited exploitation, bulldozers now rampage through the sacred groves.
 

    Several attempts have been made to indicate a way towards such a new morality, for instance, Aldo Leopold has talked of a ‘land ethic’, reflecting an ‘ecological conscience’, and even so hard-headed and unromantic a source as Soviet Science has produced the concept of ‘geohygiene’ – the hygiene of the earth. The ecologist E. P. Odum (5) has tabulated the emphases in young and mature ecosystems as follows: –
       

 
In moving away from our obsession with material progress we shall find we are creating something of a void in our hitherto crowded and hectic lives and Lewis Mumford has argued that we must try to change the emphasis from homo faber – man the maker of things, to homo ludens, playful man – the creature which develops its rich potential and lives life to the full.

    Returning to the point made at the beginning, following John Hancock’s lead, what can and should we do here at Brunel, begin a revolution or try gradualism – at least for a start? My own view is that the population resources problem may well turn out to be democracy’s ordeal by fire, as it were. Democracy might fail us on this great issue of the controlling our numbers, and the present abuse of the environment and if it does then authoritarian regimes of left or right will unceremoniously take over the job in the near future and lead us into a new Dark Age. If democracy succeeds then we could – though no doubt there are many trials and tribulations on the road – enter an age of world harmony and quiet fulfilment of the human spirit such as we are now hardly capable of envisaging.

    If we commit ourselves to the gradualism – not to mention inefficiency and frustration of democracy – then what should we do here and now on our own campus and in ,this locality?

    I think student initiative has begun to show us the way. In the admirably conceived, though possibly imperfectly organised Brunelzebub Festival, there were no less than four population/ecology exhibitions and a number of others fairly directly related, such as those concerning wild life, footpath preservation and so forth. John Hancock has followed this with his two articles and Professor Bond’s Teach-in on the ‘Blueprint for Survival’ takes place on 22nd March.

    Surely we must now start an interdisciplinary environment group of staff and students, an ‘environmental co-ordinating committee’ or possibly a campus branch of the Conservation Society (soon to change its name to something more urgent) or of Friends of the Earth, which could begin to explore the problems in a number of ways, such as the following:-

1. Encouraging an ecologically informed approach to all the disciplines taught here, from psychology to mathematics. Can we produce not just engineers, say, but ecological engineers?

2. Considering whether we could set up a Department or School of the Environment.

3. Inspiring problem-orientated research into the environmental problems of the University and the local region and getting the results translated into action.

4. Making a series of cost-benefit analyses of Brunet’s inputs and outputs and seeing if improvements are possible. The site used to be a market garden – can we grow some of our own food, can we process our sewage, generate some of our power with the methane, and use the residue as fertiliser? Can we print our own stationery, make furniture, laboratory equipment, print textbooks, do our own decoration and so forth – the possibilities are endless.

5. Stimulating liaison with outside bodies concerned with the environment and resources – especially local ones.

6. Can we foster and spread a campus ethic – as a small beginning to Leopold’s ‘land ethic’?

    The last is probably the most crucial issue of all – without enough concern and commitment to get things going then detailed plans are useless. Can we set up working parties (I mean working parties) to remove scrap and rubbish and generally tidy up the campus? Set up a vigilante corps to keep an eye on abuses of our existing resources and on new developments which look like diminishing the amenity value of the campus or the local area, and to try to foster an attitude of awareness of the very large ‘amounts of wealth generated by others and consumed here, often quite needlessly. Why should people put their dirty boots on chairs and stub out their cigarettes on coffee tables paid for by the sweat of other people’s brows? How many of us would dream of switching off the lights when we have finished with a lecture room, or closing the outer doors in icy weather. All of these things would save hard cash given to us by our fellow citizens and foster a respect for those who create the wealth we consume. Why should an irresponsible minority – at least I hope it is a minority – ignore the no-smoking rules in lecture rooms and elsewhere, our parking regulations, one-way system, speed limits, and many other simple but basic rules of sociable conduct?

    If this is a bad list of projects let us meet, scrap it, and draw up a better one. But let us get together now and do something concrete to start Brunel on the way to becoming the first ecologically managed University in the Western world. The Chinese appear to be doing it already.

Jack Parsons,
Lecturer in Social Institutions. School of Social Science. Brunel University

(1) Population, Resources, Environment. Ehrlich and Ehrlich. (1970).
(2) Principles of Political Economy. John Stuart Mill.
(3) The Costs of Economic Growth. E. J. Mishan.
(4) The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis. Lynn White. Science: 155, 1205, 1967.
(5) The Strategy of Ecosystem Development. E. P. Odum. Science: 164, 1969.


Author’s note, October 15, 2003

    Shortly after this article was published, the author’s proposal for the setting up of a Brunel Environment Group ‘BEG’, was quite enthusiastically taken up by a wide range of supporters and he was elected as the first convenor. The first two projects to be realised were the cleaning up of the ornamental pond in front of the Admin. Building – and then the introduction there of fish and water-lilies, followed by the planting of quite a few more trees around the large, open campus.
    Regrettably, the two main JP projects – the self-building * of an ‘ecohouse’** on campus for occupation by research students who, along with their main projects, would monitor its performance, and the self-building of a large windmill to generate electricity for campus-use – had not got sufficiently under way by the time he was offered a post at Cardiff University’s new population centre and no-one else was prepared to push hard enough to see the projects through.

    The main difficulty with the ecohouse was raising sufficient funds from outside sources, but there was strong and active opposition to the windmill project on the part of some influential members of the engineering and science faculties. Some were convinced that talk of windmills was romantic nonsense, while others were not at all keen on social science upstarts poking their noses into technical matters. Brunel could have pioneered in both of these spheres.

* Most of Brunel’s courses were of the ‘sandwich’ variety, students had a roughly 50/50 mix of academe and ‘industry’, so self-building would have fitted in very well with the basic educational philosophy.

**I had heard about the winning of an architectural prize for the design of such a house by the Cambridge University undergraduate husband-&-wife team, Brenda & Robert Mead and made it my business to get to know them and find out if they would agree to having their winning design built on the Brunel campus. We got on well: they became quite keen on the idea, and it was a sad disappointment to us all that the project fell through from lack of funding.