Soil and Soul

In a recent edition of the National Geographic magazine in a story about the destruction of one of the world’s most crucial resources – soil – the article talks of just how aggressive Mao’s ideology was with the natural world. “Move the hills, fill gullies and create plains! Destroy forests!” were key policies which have led today to the world’s most per-capita resource poor country standing at the edge of its own – and the world’s environmental meltdown. Communism was no better respecter of nature than is free-market neoliberalism. Neither the right nor the left have a natural philosophical grip on the causes and solutions to unsustainability.

If we continue to ignore such crucial but un-sexy resources as soil we are doomed. President Jimmy Carter knew this – he was a farmer and way ahead of his time as a politician (echoing out thoughts in Citizen Renaissance) in realising how consumerism and lack of respect for soil and soul was going to end in tears. Simon Schama has shown Carter speaking of this in his wonderful The American Future . To quote another US President, Franklin Roosevelt said “The history of every nation is eventually written in the way in which it cares for its soil”. My friend Alastair McIntosh speaks to this connection between nature and spirit in his must-read book Soil and Soul.

But recognising the value of nature to us spiritually and also in practical terms is leading some to try and put a financial value on all of nature. It seems a strange thing to do when its clear that ‘knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing’ is what got us into the mess we are in now. Indeed many NGOs seem to have sold their souls to the popular ‘ecosystem services valuation’ zeitgeist.

Now an important new report Commodifying Nature’s Last Straw? warns of a corporate grab on all biodiversity in the post peak-oil and climate change realisation and a rush into the ‘sugar economy’. Just as a ‘green-growth’ economy cannot be the answer to our problems, neither can any ‘new economy’ which merely picks up the pieces of the now broken model of growth-fetish corporate-consumer-capitalism and fumbles in the dark to piece it into something new.

Before we rush head long into any new economy we should be asking ourselves far more fundamental questions than ‘how do we keep our cars on the road’. We should be asking what is it to be human, what is our relationship to each other and to the natural world, what do we really want from life, what does it mean to live a ‘good life’. Only then can we start to glimpse the shape of a Wellbeing Economy which respects and does not feed off nature and which can be truly sustainable. The building blocks of the new model have to be understanding of the true meaning of needs (not created wants) and of the means (sustainable resource use) left to us now our post industrial age hangover shows us the mess we have made of the planet. We are trying to ask some of these questions and imagine what this new Wellbeing Economy might look like in Citizen Renaissance and would love your thoughts.