The argument that the unfettered market will provide for our post-oil future is not only wrong, it is dangerous.
John Parker's optimistic article (ODT, 13.3.08) that a post-oil future will be provided for by the unfettered market, reminded me of Cyclone Bola.
There is a story of Treasury economists commenting on the devastation that 1988 perfect storm wrought on the Northern Hawkes Bay and East Coast landscape. Hills, plains, and rivers were all affected, with sometimes metres of mud and debris burying stock yards and houses, and millions of tonnes of soil swept out to sea.
The Treasury economists stood figuratively, and in some cases literally, amid the destruction and pronounced: "We do not accept there is a market failure here. They will learn their lesson, and won't do it again.'' And so we started to argue.
We should have simply stuck to our guns that the market was a complete irrelevance when dealing with such complex social and ecological events. Such destruction had happened before, and has happened since. But we didn't. Such was the power of this strange priesthood whose faith gained so much influence in the 1980s and '90s.
Once they set the framework of the debate, we were sucked into arguing that there had, in fact, been a market failure. The market became the reference point, the arbiter of all value and policy.
By buying into an argument regarding an abstract - a market - we move the debate into a domain that my old philosophy professor would say is not real. In so doing, we leave the deeply layered and complex reality of a devastated land and community behind.
We reduced the suffering and the complexity to a simple matter of exchange: to dollars and resources. This is similar to the argument the market will provide in relation to peak oil.
All the history of ecological and social collapse is ignored, and it is confidently pronounced - because there have been occasions in the past where substitution of one resource for another has occurred - that our future is assured. It is not.
But back to Bola. At the time, many wondered whether our Treasury friends, fresh-faced from the commerce school seminaries, would stand at ground zero of a nuclear blast and chant their mantra: "We do not accept this is a market failure'', like some Vogon guard out of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy spouting, "Resistance is useless''. The market will provide. There is no alternative. Why not stand in the middle of Auschwitz and spout the same. Could anything be less real?
To reduce anything complex to a couple of variables of supply and demand, preferably quantified in dollars, is not simply bewilderingly simplistic and silly, it is dangerous.
And yet we have done it in this country with things as complex as education, welfare, health, the media, the provision of infrastructural services like power and rail, even in one bizarre occasion the valuation of the Turnbull Library's Milton collection.
In the 1990s, Treasury had suggested that putting it on the market would establish its value. So much was reduced to customers and suppliers, and some weird idea of equilibrium and efficiency, as indicated by whether two lines representing supply and demand met at the right place on a two-dimensional graph.
The qualitative is not considered. The complex is ignored. One could ask what culture is worth, or love.
Shelley's poem Ozymandias conjures the image of a broken statue of some long-dead king of kings from some long-dead civilisation surrounded by desert, proclaiming all to look upon his greatness. Such collapses are not fiction.
They happened; from small valley communities, island nations, forest and marine ecosystems, to great civilisations. They still happen.
The history is that loss of qualitative social and ecological capacity, and resource depletion, can lead to rapid system shift, including collapse.
New technology is no panacea. It has often led to an exacerbation of that collapse. If money is the aim, give me an iron axe over an adze of stone; a fish-finder and a driftnet over a rod and a rowboat. I can be more efficient. I can outcompete the poor sucker left so deservedly in my wake.
One of the more popular examples of dramatic collapse is Sumeria, an ancient culture once thriving in the area of today's Iraq.
Sumerians developed the technologies of irrigation, cities, the first record of writing, and efficient deforestation. Their culture collapsed as soil erosion
and salination eventually swamped it.
But that description reduces something deeply social to the merely physical. It was the actions of people living within a particular context that led to failure, not some mechanical relationship of supply and demand.
And their focus was on the immediate needs in life, rather than any long-run consequences.
Consequences can either return quickly, or take some time. We tend only to see the immediate feedbacks, and when the long-run feedbacks return, we are not only surprised, we often fail to register the actions that generated them.
It is the long-run consequences that have the real potential to bite. They track through convoluted pathways and domains beyond anything remotely commercial; to the realms of the social and the environmental.
Their paths are not so obvious as the simple idea that more irrigation feeds more at least for a while and so these long-term feedback loops are ignored, except by those that most consider oddballs before the event.
They can lead to disaster, nudging a system over the edge. Complex collapse has one thing in common with all such examples. With very odd exceptions, the bulk of the community involved neither desired, nor predicted if, when, or how the collapses would occur.
Most believe the future will be like the present, and just demand more and cheaper bread.
These examples in history indicate that people and technology can be as destructive as constructive. Whether markets exist or not is often an irrelevance; completely beside the point.
While they cannot always be blamed for collapse, neither can they be credited with salvation. It is human ideas, thoughts, and actions that matter; not markets.
If there is one contributing cause of collapse, at least with regard to social systems, it is the shrinking of people's actions and interests to the narrow and the now; to some focused specialty, blind to connection, potential threat, and consequence; primarily concerned about the self and immediate satisfaction.
In other words, to more and cheaper bread. The ethicists refer to this as egoism, and it is the creed of the neo-liberal economic mindset.
There is irony in that this narrow perspective on life - the one that may most threaten us as a species - is espoused by the fervent followers
of the market.
Putting aside the threat of climate change, we can assuredly have a future after the current fossil fuel age. However, it will probably require a different way of thinking and doing.
Those that advocate the narrowness of markets and the desirability of short-term, narrow, self interest that go hand-in-hand with market fundamentalism, may be promoting the very perspective that is the greatest threat to human existence.
They go far beyond that envisaged by Adam Smith, who recognised the undesirability of accumulated aristocratic and corporate power, and also the need to prevent the vices of narrowness, selfishness, short-sightedness and greed through education of enlightenment and morality.
Greater even than these vices is perhaps the faith that salvation is outside ourselves and our own thoughts and actions; that the market can act as an impartial and wise arbiter absolving us from care and responsibility.
That is about as intelligent as walking blindly into the traffic, wearing nothing but the smile of absolved sin, in the belief the god-like, benevolent market will provide.
The future is our responsibility, too real and complex to be reduced to an abstract hope.
Chris Perley is a Dunedin consultant in land use policy and sustainable land management.
