Western Parasite Behaviour: Repeating the mistakes of the past

In this entry I am looking to explore how we, as humans, try to exonerate our species with a variety of scapegoats that diverts attention and blame away from our own activities. 45,000 years ago, Homo sapiens was not particularly bothered about how they came off as a species, and the historical record presents our species as an ecological serial killer (Harari, 2011, p.75).  Within 2,000 years of the arrival of Homo sapiens in to North America, the continent had lost 34/47 genera of large mammals - Harari described the movement in 10,000BC as 'the human blitzkrieg.' Of course, in our more primal evolutionary days, this was simply the mark of an animal exceedingly good at adapting to a wide range of environments, and surprising the bountiful megafauna with the deadly intelligence and superior handicraft encased in a physically meagre body not worth particular attention.

Homo sapiens habits have not changed that much, and we continue to make excuses for what might be regarded as bad behaviour. This has emerged in the concept of 'weak sustainability,' and it is even more important that this concept is swallowed, since the true result of the exploitation it excuses has, often times, decimated a human population's ability to survive in its long-standing environment: the resource-draining Western society has on multiple occasions shrivelled the carrying capacity of many environments that support other human populations. Here, the concept of 'weak sustainability' in the context of neoclassical economics is explored and critiqued, based on a paper by Gowdy and McDaniel, 1999.

Weak sustainability: An economy is sustainable if its capacity to generate an income for future generations. Weak sustainability is achieved if an economy saves more than the combined depreciation of its total capital, even if it is drawing down its stock of natural resources (Gowdy & McDaniel, 1999, p. 333). 

Weak sustainability: Z (sustainability index) = [(savings/income) - (depreciation of manufactured capital/income) - (depreciation of natural capital/income)] x 100. If Z > 0 , than an economy is weakly sustainable. 
Notice the problem with this? According to this equation (Pearce & Atkinson, 1993), Japan, Costa Rice and the Netherlands are the most sustainable countries in the world. They have high savings rates and low rates of natural capital depletion. Japan and the Netherlands have completely destroyed their original natural environments, meaning their depreciation of natural capital is incredibly low. There is nothing much left to depreciate. Further, a country with a low income because it has run out of capital will generate a higher overall score. The flaws in this equation make it night impossible to run a negative score: this means every economy is, by the standards of Pearce & Atkinson, at the very least weakly sustainable.

Case Study: The selling of Nauru

Nauru is a central Pacific island with a circumference of ~20km, and originally supported a human population of around 1,000, who were subsistence livers dependent upon the bounty of the natural environment, and lived, for the most part, within the carrying capacity of the island. In 1886 however, it became a German possession, and shortly after, phosphate was discovered on the island. From 1907, 630,000 tons of phosphate was mined from the island, worth around £1,000,000 - the Nauruans received at most £1300 - 1/700th of its value. 80% of the island (a plateau called Topside) now looks like this: 

(https://turismifannklubi.wordpress.com/2013/11/03/evaluating-destination-nauru/)

The phosphate was scraped from between columns of ancient coral, and the mined areas are completely inaccessible, unusable for human habitation, or anything else that might support the local community. Eventually, a local market formed and with the increasing population, even fresh water had to be imported (Gowdy & McDaniel, 1999, p. 335). Imported food replaced all natural capital, to the extent that diet-related health problems became prevalent: 50% over 50's suffer diabetes, and high rates of heart disease/hypertension have been reported.

But Nauru IS sustainable according to Pearce & Atkinson's equation from 1993.

Phosphate mining was the only intensive manufactured capital, economic activity on the island: when it crashed in 2000, the depreciation of the manufactured capital became negligible. As had the natural capital already. This gives the island a sustainability index of 33. Weak sustainability depends upon substitution of capital when manufactured or natural stuffs becomes depleted, which in our economic system comes principally in the form of trade. For Nauru, this means the people live off of the interest generated by a trust fund created on their behalf - one bad investment or financial crisis in one sector could dramatically reduce the fund and jeopardise the community. Their health depends not on the local resources, but on the stock market values, and whims of individual investors - natural environments are steady and unchanging; market economies are volatile and unstable.

Gowdy & McDaniel highlight whilst the consequences of such violent exploitation are easily recognised on such a small island nation as Nauru, this same fallout is also occuring all over the world; consider logging part of a rainforest in Indonesia, or developing land in New York.

It has long been a human habit to increase growth, then substitution and technological complexity as resources degraded and collapsed: the more the natural world is devastated, the more reliant our populations become on the manufactured world we build. Money, it has been pointed out, cannot be converted back in to extinct species.

Is our modern society different to that of the ancients? Or any different to our BC habits as Homo erectus, Homo floresiensis, or Homo neanderthalensis?