BOOK REVIEW: The Plundered Planetby Paul Collier Allen Lane; £20 (€24)
THE LIBRARY of books dealing with the economic aspects of the environment, or indeed the environmental aspect of the economy, remains small, even after 50 years of environmental economics as a subset of the “dismal” science.
The seminal book remains EF Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, although in recent years Richard Douthwaite’s The Growth Illusion has acquired status as an important work in this field.
The few books that make up this library invariably come from economists who were themselves environmentalists. The critique has been that traditional economics has failed us and has brought problems, more serious in nature, that go beyond the previous limited understanding of traditional economists.
These failures have come about because traditional economics has tended not to put a value on the “free” inputs – air, water, heat and light – offered by the environment, or to measure the life-cycle costs of extracting materials from the earth. Growth for growth’s sake, unrestricted growth, value-free growth, has been the goal and main determinant of success under the traditional economic model. Economic activity has been meant to be sustained, but not be sustainable, by maximising activity regardless of its positive or negative impact on the environment or society.
The Plundered Planetseems to be coming from a new perspective – that of a traditional economist who has come to recognise that his field's ignorance has now to be addressed. The author, Paul Collier, is a professor of economics at Oxford University and was once a director of research for the World Bank. His background would seem to epitomise the type of traditional economics that have brought us to where we are.
However, he seems to have undergone a Damascene conversion, evident by the title of the book and the theme throughout. There is a knowing irony in the opening sentence – “I grew up before nature was discovered” – helpfully printed in bold in case its subtlety wasn’t obvious.
That, of course, is a joke at the expense of an old way of thinking. The type of bigger, faster, better, more thinking that the author is seeking to challenge.
The world of commerce has traditionally seen environmentalism as an indulgence, as an impediment to the real business of creating wealth. It has taken too long to realise that protecting the environment often carries with it the benefit of enhancing prosperity. At the heart of this book is the essential truth that resources used now cannot be used again when depleted to create future wealth.
Of course, much depends on having an agreed, accepted definition of prosperity. The subtitle of the book is “How to Reconcile Prosperity with Nature”. That has been an eternal conundrum, but at least its formulation as an equation here puts the elements in a more correct order. The author is quite clear we have been trying for far too long to reconcile nature with prosperity.
A book of five parts and 11 chapters, this is more philosophical tract than academic tome. The chapter headings scream with the zeal of a convert – “The Ethics of Nature”, “Nature as Asset”, “Nature as a Factory”, “Nature Misunderstood” and “The Natural Order” – but it is no less valuable because of that.
The author, who also has a background in development issues, had previously written a book called The Bottom Billion, which examined that part of the world's population that has missed out on global prosperity. It's a theme to which he returns in this book. As a political goal, environmentalists have not been particularly successful in making the link between poverty and the environment.
Protecting the environment is about alleviating global poverty. Perhaps it is that emphasis on global poverty, with the reality that most politics are local, that has failed in promoting this intrinsic link.
Collier goes even further. He argues that within nature and its enhancement lies the means by which prosperity can be achieved for the bottom billion. Of course, some use and abuse of natural resources of the people of these parts of the world has already been occurring, particularly in relation to mineral extraction.
Collier argues tellingly that it has been the lack of appropriate, or indeed any, regulation that has brought about this abuse. It is refreshing to hear this argument being made with such gusto, in light of recent global economic crises such as banking failure and serious issues of sovereign debt.
While concentrating very much on the environment and its relationship with global development, this book seems to have much to say on the many economic difficulties that we face today, difficulties that are the failures of traditional economics.
It is hard not to stifle a smile as the author talks of the unreal and unhelpful effects that property booms have had on economies such as that of Nigeria.
This is a book that seems to be both prescient and opportune. In Britain, the unlikely alliance of right-wing Tories and centre/left Liberal Democrats places priority on the notion of a Green economy as the best means to stimulate future economic activity. This is something the Green Party in Ireland has strongly been trying to promote.
In a world where the European Union finance ministers in their response to the Greek debt crisis believe that a transnational Tobin Tax should be considered, it is clear that this is an important publication that will help lead the way to a different and better type of economics.
Senator Dan Boyle is the Green Party spokesman on finance
