Did you know that the Sumerians in Mesopotamia, such a creative and influential society, collapsed due to the salinization of the soil?

Did you know that improper irrigation practices brought at least one third of all agricultural land in Australia into an unusable state for at least 100 years, again due to salinization?

Do you know why the biggest island of the world Greenland is named “green land” at all? Is there anything green about this island of ice and snow? But it was quite green with lush forests and pastures; a paradise-like place until the 13. century before the Norse people with Scandinavian origins decimated its forests and transformed the island into a desert of ice. The Norse people were initially not aware of the fragility of Greenland’s ecology with extremely slow growing trees. They expected the same robustness and recovery power of Norway from their new environment.

Did you know that Japan was on the verge of a collapse in the 17. century caused by erosion and wood scarcity, and escaped a disaster by radical regulations to for protecting and rehabilitating its decimated forests?

Why is the economic situation of Dominican Republic is much better than Haiti? What made the difference in the destiny of two countries sharing the same island? Why could Dominican Republic manage its natural resources much better than Haiti?

Jared Diamond’s Collapseis without any doubt one of the most important and interesting books I have ever read. In that high category I can compare it only to few examples like Richard Dawkins’ Selfish Geneand Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine.

Jared Diamond makes us aware of the significance of environmental factors for societies’ well-being. He also makes us question the one-dimensional development doctrine in the classical school of economy. A doctrine which measures development with man-made tools and services largely ignoring the nature-made services that can be so crucial for the sustainability of societies.

Nature is our prime producer which produces clean water and air, solar energy, mild climate, fish in oceans, soil for agriculture, inspiration for beauty and fine arts. What’s the use of luxury motorcars and notebooks if you lack clean water and pure air? As the Turkish proverb says “ivory comb for a bald head”! (kel basa simsir tarak).

“The Worst Mistake In The History Of The Human Race” by Jared Diamond, an article published in 1987 is for me another mind opener for questioning the one-dimensional human progression and development doctrine that we used to learn at school. A central quotation from this article:

Astronomy taught us that our Earth isn’t the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we weren’t specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.

I attach the following video for your convenience: Jared Diamond speaks about Jared Diamond’s Collapse.

Documentary film based on Jared Diamond’s Collapse:

NGC time travels 200 years into the future to see what the world would look like after civilization as we know it collapsed. Guided by author Jared Diamond, we’ll piece together the remarkable story of what on earth triggered our decline.

Other must-read books by Jared Diamond:

• Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
• The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (P.S.)

Tunç Ali Kütükçüoğlu, 30 December 2011, Herrliberg-Zürich

• Renewable energy (solar, wind, geothermal, biofuels)
• Green buildings
• Energy efficient and low emission transportation
• Biomaterials like bioplastic
• Water filtration

With cleantech in the narrow sense one still means manmade technologies. For example solar panels, photovoltaic (PV) modules, high efficiency heat pumps and so on. The forerunners of cleantech industries are as always industrialized countries like Germany, Japan, China, Denmark and USA.

There is no real paradigm change in the narrow sense meaning of cleantech; some older technologies are replaced by their more energy efficient and more environmentally friendly counterparts. It could also be regarded as general improvement in technology.

Luckily, especially for people living in less industrialized countries, there is a wide-sense meaning of cleantech which also covers the technologies of nature. Cleantech in the wide sense means all kinds of solutions, manmade or natural, that improve the quality of life, save energy and protect nature. In that wide sense, cleantech is a real paradigm shift because one is not looking for only manmade equipment and machinery for a better life. This paradigm shift reminds me the transition from the classical economy to ecological economy.

Take water purification issue in an aquarium (biological filtration of the fish waste) as an example. A manmade cleantech (narrow sense) solution to this problem is an energy efficient water filter. A better solution would be using marginal plants for water purification, the technology of nature (cleantech in the wide sense). You see, cleantech in the narrow sense often means hightech, whereas in the wide sense it often means lowtech.

Another example: Using an energy efficient tractor with an electric motor (possibly powered by PV modules) to plow a farm is cleantech in the narrow sense. A better solution, namely using pigs for that purpose is cleantech in the wide sense. Pigs are a better solution than a tractor because they plow and manure the farm simultaneously. That is, pigs are cleantech tractors.

Still another example. Highly efficient electric cars (narrow sense) versus reducing the need for cars through better urban planning and bicycle ways (wide sense).

People living in less industrialized countries shouldn’t be fooled into the ideological trap of thinking cleantech only in its narrow sense. Surely, the industrialized countries would -consciously or subconsciously- do everything for this ideological conditioning. That is how they sell their expensive hightech products to developing countries. Industrialized countries owe their wealth to the widespread belief that a better life is only with hightech possible. In some cases that might be the truth: We still don’t have a lowtech substitute for refrigerators, but in most cases it is not. For example, lowtech aquariums are much better than hightech aquariums for keeping sensitive fish (see my article “biotope in my study”). You don’t necessarily need mercedes cars, mobile telephones and plasma TVs for a happy life.

We can take cleantech in the wide sense one step further: A self-sufficient lowtech life style. If you think, producing your own electricity with PV modules is an attractive idea, why not think about producing your own bio-energy for your body, namely food?

John Seymour (1914-2004), the father of self-sufficiency and the author of
The Self-Sufficient Life and How To Live It developed a passion for a self-sufficient life style more than 40 years ago.

Who is John Seymour? After visiting schools in England and Switzerland he studied agriculture at the Wye College in London. After college he went to Africa and lived there for more than six years. He managed a sheep farm in Namibia. He hunted bucks and lions with bushmen in the Namib desert. He went deep-sea fishing for a year and worked in a copper mine in today’s Zambia for six months. He traveled all over the central Africa for two years inoculating native cattle.

With his unmatched experience in rural life he developed a passion for a self-sufficient life style which he could realize in his farm in Wales. He promoted self-sufficiency on typically five acre (20 thousand square meter) farms. He also founded a School for Self-Sufficiency in Ireland.

John Seymour is not only a man of handwork and practice but also an impressively eloquent author. The fist chapter of his book is devoted the meaning of self-sufficiency. I’d like to quote some of his expressive sentences from this chapter:

Self-sufficiency does not mean “going back” to the acceptance of a lower standard of living. On the contrary, it is striving for a higher standard of living. … for the health of body and piece of mind that comes with hard, varied work in the open air.

Unless you measure your quality of life with dollars and technological widgets and gadgets of course. The price you would pay in such a case is wage slavery according to John Seymour. In other words, becoming mindless termites of the modern economy.

We may not wish in the future to maintain a standard of living that depends entirely on elaborate and expensive equipment and machinery, but we will always want to maintain a high standard of living in the things that really matter -good food, clothing, shelter, health, happiness, and fun with other people.

We are not meant to be a one-job animal. We do not thrive as parts of a machine. We are intended by nature to be diverse, to do diverse things, to have many skills.

I couldn’t agree with the quotation above: We are not meant to be a one-job animal. We have our natural interests, but depending on the circumstances of the economy we are usually forced to do some highly specialized jobs which have a low degree of relationship with our natural interests. Only small lucky minority really enjoy their jobs. Even the long domestication and indoctrination process, namely education, as preparation to our economic life does not help much in that sense. We may learn to endure boring jobs, or accept them as normality, but that is not real happiness. Real happiness may sometimes need courageous decisions such as changing the whole life style.

Tunç Ali Kütükçüoğlu, January 2010, Zürich

Original 5-level hierarchy of needs from Maslow. Click on it to see the larger picture.

The bottom line of this article is very simple: “Make the most of what you already have”. Nothing new, nothing extraordinary, just what the common sense says.

You may see on the left side the famous five-level hierarchy of needs from Maslow. This hierarchy is after 1990s further extended to include transcendence, helping others to actualize themselves, on the topmost level of the pyramid. I think it is actually related with esteem needs and reciprocal altruism which is common for all social creatures.

Improving the quality of life, or well-being of society is (or should be) the ultimate purpose of economic decisions. But measuring the quality of life is a real challenge, an extensive research area in social sciences and economics.

What makes people happy? There are objective and subjective determinants of well-being. Objective factors like satisfying basic needs such as food, safety, health, shelter etc. as indicated in the two bottom levels of Maslow’s pyramid are relatively easy to measure. Governments and economists can gather reliable information concerning these factors.

What shall we do about the subjective factors like social needs, self fulfillment and satisfaction from life? Surely, we can’t measure these factors with per capita dollars. Life quality surveys are an attempt to measure well-being whose criteria change much from culture to culture.

But common sense says that you can improve well-being even though you can’t exactly measure it.

Many life quality surveys try to find out what people desire in the subjective department. These desires are mostly accepted as given. Why? Advertisers never do; their job is brainwashing and conditioning people so that they should believe that their well-being will be improved by their products.

Every sale starts with a belief. In order to buy an expensive Mercedes you must first believe that your well-being, in form of comfort, security, status or whatever, will be improved by this car. Can you as a customer scientifically measure that a Mercedes improves your well-being? No. Of course there might be some tangible convincing arguments like security, fuel efficiency, speed etc., but the rest, in most cases the larger portion is simply belief. Advertisers know this very well and work on beliefs and subconscious impressions in their advertisements rather than bombarding their audience with some hard facts and numbers.

If you ask an average person on the street “what is for you development?” she will tell you about luxury cars, hand phones, wide-screen televisions, high-end hifi sets etc. Some of these products may really manifest her natural interests and inclinations, but the rest is brainwashing and conditioning combined with the herd psychology; the result of decades of hard work by companies, their advertisers and even by some economists.

Many liberal economists would say “you can’t tell people not to consume, or less to consume without giving them any economic incentives; otherwise you are not an economist but an ideologist”.

But companies tell people what to consume to improve their lives through their advertisements and public relations. They are in that sense mind manipulators. They even manipulate governments by lobbying in the best case, by police force and bribery in the worst.

That tells me that mind manipulation in order to shape interests and desires is in fact free in a liberal society. Why should mind manipulation be left solely to commercial companies? As commonly known, there are market failures which means leaving everything to market forces and free competition is not optimal for the overall well-being of the society. That’s why we have governments and market regulations.

I want to finish my article with an hypothetical model case in order to make my point clear. Mind manipulation could be used for the well-being of a society. You don’t need to tell people not to consume, or less to consume (e.g. for the sake of environment). You only need to tell them what to consume through peaceful mind manipulation, as a government, or as a well-meaning noncommercial organization, just like commercial companies do.

Now my model case: Speed motorboats versus sailboats.
Assume, you are the governor of a middle-stand society, neither rich nor too poor,  living at the seashore. You know that the basic needs of this society is satisfied (remember the bottom two levels of Maslow). You want to improve the recreational life of your society, and you have two options: Either motorboats or sailboats.

Further assumptions which should be considered as given:

• Motorboats are much more expensive than sailboats. Motorboats need fuel which adds to their costs and environmental drawbacks (i.e. hidden costs to society).
• Motorboats are noisy and sometimes dangerous for swimmers (i.e. hidden costs to society).
• There’s no reason that motorboats are more enjoyable than sailboats. People who know how to sail enjoy sailing as much as people who ride motorboats.
• Only a wealthy minority can buy motorboats whereas accommodating sailboats presents problem for the majority of this society.
• The motorboat industry is much bigger that the sailboat’s even though a wealthy minority can buy motorboats.

Clearly, motorboat companies and related industries will do everything to promote motorboats because there is money in it. If you leave it solely to commercial companies you won’t hear much about sailboats because there’s not much profit in it. You can even expect powerful lobbying against sailboats because the motorboat industry may perceive sailboats as nasty competitors and profit-killers. Remember, companies like GM and Ford lobbied vigorously against railroads in USA.

A clear case showing that the interests of commercial companies may not always be in parallel with the well-being of the society; in fact sometimes against it. It’s the duty of governments and nonprofit organization to counterbalance the mind manipulation of commercial companies driven by their narrow interests.

In such a case, a well-meaning governor should do everything to promote sailboats in order to improve the well-being of his society. He could for example organize sailing courses and events, and support educational TV programs for sailing.

So I came back to a slightly modified form of my initial statement: “Make the most of what you can have”. The majority can have sailboats, so direct the interests to sailboats and enjoy it. No magic, no brilliance, only common sense. But even the simplest common sense can sometimes be obscured by brainwashing and subconscious conditioning.

Some muddled economists could say “your case is not so clear as it seems. Promoting motorboats may for example create more workplaces”. Nonsense of course. Workplace in itself doesn’t mean enhanced life quality. We are talking here about a closed single society; we are not exporting products or services to another society of whose well-being we don’t care much. In a closed system the work itself must be useful and add to overall well-being.

If this muddled economist were right you could as well invent any nonsense business like “tearing the buildings down in order to rebuild them” or “selling tons of sea water to people who believe that it is good against stomach problems”. By promoting such nonsense sectors you are actually not creating but transferring wealth to people who don’t deserve it with considerable transaction losses whereby you simply waste times of people.

Tunç Ali Kütükçüoğlu, September 2009, Zürich

References:

1. Quality of life – Wikipedia
2. Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and diagrams

One day, a businessman comes to your village with a fat local politician, talking about building a factory at the lake shore. The politician promises for more wealth and workplace. He says “we want to leave middle age behind us. We will have cars, modern TVs and music sets. We will eat fine food from the supermarket in the village center”.

Very seductive, isn’t it? Or is it?

Some critical minds raise questions about pollution and noise, but the politician assures that the factory will have a decent waste treatment facility and the level of pollution will be kept within tolerable limits. Tolerable means here, no harm will be done to human health.

This is also the way how a neoclassical economist thinks. The nature is a passive entity for either extracting natural resources like wood, minerals and oil, or a dumping ground for waste material. There’s no harm done as long as the carrying capacity of our environment is not exceeded.

Neoclassical model for economy & environment

There’s still an important question to be asked however, among others. “What will happen to the production capacity of our lake? How will this factory with its waste dumped into the lake affect it?” Remember, fishing is our primary source of sustenance, and for fishing we depend on our lake.

“Production capacity of a lake? How odd! Lakes don’t have a production capacity” says the politician. Yes sir, they do like most of other ecological resources like forests, oceans and rivers.

For ecological economics there are two kinds of capital: Natural and manmade. Consequently,  there are two sources for our welfare: Services of natural capital (ecological services) and manmade capital. And that’s the main biggest difference between the conventional (neoclassical) and ecological economics. Conventional economists have a narrow minded focus on manmade capital and services. They usually ignore that an intact ecology provides us with the most essential products and services like clean air and water, mild climate, food, medical plants, erosion prevention, recreation, meaning and enjoyment in life.

“Why?” you may ask. “Are all of the conventional economists simply idiots?”

Well some of them might be. Some of them might have their own agendas, or serve the narrow interests of certain influential groups. Some of them might be well educated in their expertise area, otherwise perfectly ignorant in life sciences. Some of them may be too slow to adapt from empty to full world paradigm (see Ecological Economics, Herman E. Daly)

But most of them suffer from one-sided neoclassical ideology and indoctrination. As already mentioned, they focus solely on manmade products and services. Development and growth are measured by some dollar numbers which can only be representative for the amount and quality of manmade tools and services. Consequently, technology is for them an artifact of humanity; they are blind to the more elaborate and sustainable technology of nature.

Basic model of ecological economics

Now compare for example our lake as a natural fishery with a manmade fish farm. Feeding, breeding, diseases, filtering, aeration, cleaning etc. all these cumbersome issues that needs hard and boring work for an artificial fishery are solved automatically and self-sufficiently by the lake itself. An ecologically intact lake with its vicinity is a perfect example for a sustainable technology; it can produce fish for hundreds of years, whereas an artificial fish farm becomes a muddy, smelly and ugly piece of unproductive land after ten years of operation. New diseases produced in fish farms due to intensive fish keeping may even harm wild stocks. An ecologically intact lake is good for the welfare of the society; a manmade fishery is good for accumulating wealth in the hands of a privileged minority.

Assume you want to pull down an active factory in order to replace it with a new one. Every rational person, even a neoclassical economist expects a good explanation for this intention. You must show that you have no other choice than pulling down the old factory, and prove that the economic value of the new factory is much higher than pulling down the old one.

Similarly, the businessman in our case must convince the villagers that the opportunity costs of building a factory at the lake shore are lower than the added welfare value of the factory for each villager. Just think of the reduced annual fish production which is only one of the long list of opportunity costs beside noise, pollution and industrial ugliness. Aquatic crustaceans for example, decapods shrimps etc. as primary food source for fish react very sensitive to even lowest levels of pollution. What will exactly happen to the ecosystem of the lake? What will be the opportunity cost of reduced fish production? Rational economists should ask these questions.

Tunç Ali Kütükçüoğlu, July 2009, Zürich