Amid my frantic college essay writing and music playing and debating and dancing and singing and schoolworking and relaxing I have had little time for blogging. Hopefully this will change next semester, as I enjoy writing informally and particularly enjoy the thrill of shouting my opinions into the void where somebody might stumble across them.
I was going to post this as a facebook note to see what other people thought and maybe inspire an interesting discussion, but-- what did I create a blog for, if not this? This is my response to the Claremont McKenna College supplemental essay question, and I'm posting it here (for, I think, my first inclusion of formal writing) because I actually enjoyed writing it and like the way it turned out and think other people might enjoy it too, in a thought-experiment sort of way. Anyway, enjoy.
Prompt: Choose someone, fictional or nonfictional, historical or contemporary, whom you consider to be a leader. Suppose you are this person’s primary advisor. How would you advise this person and why?
I would advise the early capitalist writer Adam Smith to recognize the inherent worth of the natural world, rather than commodify a country’s natural environment in terms of its ability to produce wealth for that nation. While Smith’s consolidation of money, goods, labor, and resources into the umbrella of “wealth” provided a pragmatic and effective paradigm for countries to maximize their economic welfare, I believe that that same cold utilitarianism in initializing the doctrine of capitalism is partly responsible for the way in which the modern free market promotes the abuse and callous mistreatment of the Earth and her natural, finite, and inestimably valuable resources.
Adam Smith justified laissez-faire economics by analyzing the nature of wealth and concluding that rational individuals acting within an economy in their own self-interest will produce wealth for the economic system at large, and thereby increase the benefits to each individual within that system as the value of his or her share in the economy increases. However, this dangerously presupposes that the only valid economic goal is one of expansion—indeed, capitalist doctrine is founded on the notion that nations must forever endeavor to increase their wealth above other economic concerns. With the energy crisis of the 1970s and the environmental movements in the later 20th century came the realization that the global economy exists within the biosphere—that a sustainable ratio of development and consumption to resource utilization is key to maintaining a functional economy in the first place. Unfortunately, these convictions have been systematically opposed by the entities that stand to lose the most if we decide to curb our resource demands, even as those resource demands skyrocket with population growth and a globalization of unsustainable habits. And it is Adam Smith’s conviction that self-interested action will eventually benefit the whole—the “invisible hand” of the economy—that encourages and justifies the frequency with which these ferocious interests reign unchecked.
The idea of conservation for conservation’s sake has been recognized at points throughout the past several hundred years, but if I were to advise Adam Smith on his treatise, I would have him embed it even deeper in the fiber of our economic understanding. Conceiving of land as a penumbra of wealth, as he did, established the ideological foundations for hundreds of years of exploitive industry. We recognize now that the environment is valuable for its beauty, that the biosphere is a fragile and complex system, and that a worldview which places human monetary gain at the pinnacle of estimable values is arrogant, unsustainable, and irresponsible—but we’re arriving late to the party. If only Adam Smith could have had the foresight then to recognize these concerns.
Of course a proclamation of conservation, being neither pragmatic at a time when resource availability was limited only by transportation, nor fiscally intuitive to a generation of dogmatically utilitarian enlightenment thinkers and joint-stock company merchants, would likely have been received poorly—if at all. In fact, Adam Smith’s popularity might have been due in large part to his expression of financially intuitive precepts, so it would be ludicrous to imagine that such advice, even presuming that Smith would take it, would have sufficiently powerful implications to unilaterally alter the course of the economy-nature relationship during the industrial revolution. But I would give Adam Smith that advice nonetheless; I would endeavor to convey the realities of a world with finite and precious resources to a man who knew of only logistical limitations to resource exploitation; I would do anything to imbue an innate respect for nature’s majesty in the violent utility calculus of modern economics.
I would not plant the seed of environmental awareness in The Wealth of Nations in order to see tangible results in those centuries—rather, I would plant the seed because planting the seed is valuable in its own right. Galileo and Copernicus never saw their convictions inspire overwhelming changes, and yet their ideas were instrumental in the development of more sophisticated models of the universe. Adam Smith did much more than explain the nuances of supply and demand; he created a pervasive evaluative system that defined worth for hundreds of years. Introducing criteria to that system other than ‘utility of production’ would have allowed environmentalism to germinate for as long as rule capitalism. Understanding that the natural world has value irrespective of its potential to facilitate wealth, I would tell Adam Smith, is key to an accurate and humble value system, a successful capitalist endeavor, and a sustainable future.
