“Extractive industry is not development. When you come to extract what is in the soil for the benefit of shareholders, when you come to pollute water, destroy biodiversity and natural resources, and the ecological infrastructure, that is not development. The kind of development trajectory we want is one that is ecologically sustainable.”

Speaking at the global summit of the Club of Rome think-tank, held outside Stellenbosch this month, environmentalist and activist Sinegugu Zukulu represented the Xolobeni community from Pondoland on the Wild Coast, which has been fighting for two decades to prevent its community and environment from being torn up by Australia-based mining company Mineral Commodities, which wants to dig titanium from ancestral land.

“To do so we need to learn from indigenous communities so we can bring out a depth of humanity that we have lost.”

“Three-quarters of the land-based environment and about 66% of the marine environment have been significantly altered by human actions,” the report’s authors say. “On average these trends have been less severe or avoided in areas held or managed by indigenous peoples and local communities.”

To arrest the ecological overshoot driving the collapse of natural systems, “we need a fundamentally different way of living. We need a fundamentally different economics to what we teach and practice now,” declared Korten.

In 1972, the Club of Rome commissioned Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers in the US to produce the now-famous Limits to Growth study. In it, they used computer-based modelling to show that continuing trends in global pollution, food production, resource use, industrialisation and population growth would lead to depletion of essential resources and systems, beginning in the 21st century.

Humanity faces an ‘immediate existential risk, requiring emergency action’

Modern economics has failed us, Korten told summit delegates. Since the 1970s, neoliberalism has schooled generations of business and government leaders in the false assumption that the economy can be built on unlimited growth, and that it would relieve global poverty.

“Humanity consumes 1.7 times what Earth can sustain, which is coming at the expense of destroying the regenerative system that we have to count on to maintain the health of the Earth and humans.”

The promised trickle-down of wealth has also not happened, with a cavernous divide now existing between the rich and poor.

“We are now talking about the collapse of civilisation and the self-extinction of the human species. The status quo cannot be sustained.”

The Club of Rome gathering called for an end to neoliberal economics, which ignores society’s dependence on natural life-supping systems, and only values people and Earth in terms of their market price and contribution to gross domestic product (GDP). Economists need to find a new measure for prosperity, beyond GDP, which only measures growth and marketised human consumption, regardless of how destructive it is.

“Destroying life for money is suicidal,” Korten said.

But with the existential crisis of climate collapse, comes an existential opportunity to create something that works for all people and life, and should draw on indigenous communities’ world view that understands humanity’s interdependence on each other and nature, embodied in the notion of ubuntu.

A new economics needs to come with a new civilisation, he argues, one which has “shed the conceit that Earth was created for humans to exploit”.

The low-regulation environment of neoliberal economics has allowed for carbon pollution to be dumped into the atmosphere free of charge and externalised the environmental and health costs of producing this waste. This debt is now being paid in the form of extreme weather events, food and water shortages, mass migration, and political instability.

Restructuring economies away from a neoliberal system in order to slow carbon pollution and respond to collapsing natural systems means introducing immediate and tight government regulations that put a high cost on pollution and obliges the polluters to pay for the environmental fallout. A study released last week gives a road map for how to do that.

The road map for response laid out in the paper would call for firm policies that remove fossil fuel subsidies, tax carbon pollution, encourage measures aimed at keeping fossil fuel stocks in the ground, stall the release of short-lived pollutants such as methane gas, and support a rapid switch to renewable energy sources. Bernard and her peers suggest a post-World War II-style Marshal-plan approach to begin the retreat from vulnerable coastlines and massive investment in restoring ecosystems which can help mop carbon pollution from the atmosphere while providing airbags to help absorb some of the shocks of extreme weather events.

With a new post-neoliberal economics comes a reversal of the value systems and world view that has allowed Western consumer culture and predatory Capitalism to plunder the atmospheric space at the expense of a stable, life-supporting climate.

Hearing the marginalised and silenced voices of indigenous communities

“If the western world is to make this transition to a new civilisation… we need a new economics that is grounded in the reality of our true nature as living beings born of and nurtured by a living Earth,” said Korten. “These are not just kind words, this is our fundamental reality which most of our science and economics have denied, which is why we are in deep trouble. Twenty-first-century economics will be grounded in the wisdom of indigenous people who lived in a balanced symbiotic relationship with Earth.”

But it is these very indigenous voices that Sinegugu Zukulu said are still marginalised, and sometimes even silenced.

“Hope,” he said, “lies in the vision of a possible world that is of life, love, and beauty. This is a time for a new economics that can create a culture and institutions based on sufficiency and abundance for all. Ubuntu: together we live, in isolation we die.” DM

Korten’s eight principles for the economics of the 21st century

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  New economic indicators that measure the well-being of people and the planet, rather than measuring consumption rates or the monetisation of relationships;

  
  


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  Use resources, including labour, in a way that benefits all life (which means doing away with war, dependence on cars, financial speculation, and advertising that promotes consumerism);

  
  


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  Change in ownership so that power returns to the hands of the people, and taking it away from trans-national corporations;

  
  


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  Create an accountable, transparent money system that serves community interests;

  
  


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  Refocus education so that it gives skills to deal with the rapid and dramatic change that lies ahead;

  
  


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  Create and use technology to enhance the well-being of people and planet, and limit technologies that exploit, control, or displace people or nature;

  
  


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  Create interlinked, cooperative, bio-regional communities, linking rural with urban communities and allowing the free sharing of information and technology with all who might benefit; and

  
  


• For the human population to achieve a healthy balance with other species in a way that is consistent with the well-being of all. DM