Only New Economics Can Save Great Lakes

There is a substantial and growing consensus that planet Earth is in trouble and that the prevalent economic model, which has brought us to the point of crisis, will not be the solution to the crisis. Continued dumb growth, resource exploitation, and environmental degradation, do not provide a sustainable way forward. Although the current system is entrenched, and will resist change, change is the only real option.

According to Umair Haque (and others), the dominant economic systems of the past two centuries have shifted costs to, and borrowed benefits from society, the natural world, and future generations. Both cost shifting and benefit borrowing are forms of economic harm that are unfair and nonconsensual, that while enriching a few, “result in value of low quality, counterbalanced by deep hidden debt.” Today, Haque explains, countries, companies, and people are struggling to repay the deep debt incurred by yesterday’s harm. “The result is the slow, steady, diminishment of prosperity.”

Around the Great Lakes are 43 Areas of Concern, each a specific example of cost shifting and benefit borrowing. Outboard motor manufacturers, mining companies, shipping companies, paper mills, agricultural interests, to name a few, took what really is the common property of the first nations, tribes, and the citizens of the states and provinces surrounding the Great Lakes, and exploited it and degraded it for the enrichment of a few. Today, people with environmental awareness realize the necessity of paying for this past despoliation, but see it as a phenomenon whereby the robber barons and captains of industry of previous generations are reaching from the past to shake down the present and fleece the future. Of perhaps even greater concern is the fact that avaricious extortion projects continue today, as perhaps evidenced by the push for an open-pit mine in the Gogebic-Penokee Range.

The impending global environmental and economic crisis, so clearly documented by Paul Gilding, Bill McKibben, and many others, means that the system is going to change—the only question is how—through severe, chaotic disruption, or through a more thoughtful, managed approach.

Thinkers like Umair Haque, Peter Sengeiv, and organizations like Mowat Centre/Brookings Institiution, and the Council of Canadians, believe that a managed approach is possible.

“The contrast between economic growth and environmental damage, so prevalent during the region’s previous era of economic prosperity, is a relic of the past. A healthy ecosystem is increasingly understood to be crucial to the region’s future economic success,” according to Mowat/Brookings.

Haque reasons, “twenty-first capitalism must organize the better saving and accumulation of every kind of productive resource for tomorrow. Its precepts and commandments must begin with minimizing economic harm and end with maximizing the creation of authentic value. Organizations cannot, by action or inaction, allow people, communities, society, the natural world, or future generations to come to economic harm.”

While movement away from the environmentally careless and unsustainable economic growth model will occur one way or another, the devastating fact is that it may come too late to save the Great Lakes. The Lakes are threatened as never before: Lake Superior’s bottom is fouled with asbestos and its waters contaminated with PCBs, Lakes Michigan and Huron have now experienced 13 years of unprecedented, sustained low water, Lake Erie may be relapsing into a coma, everywhere pollutants are still entering the water, habitat is being lost, and invasive species are proliferating. All this while the effects of climate change are just beginning to be felt.

The people of the Lakes do not want to lose the Lakes. To a large extent they rely on their governments, to which they pay taxes, to represent them and to provide the necessary resources to restore and manage them. Unfortunately, those politicians elected to serve the people are often beholden to corporate interests. As a glance at the news almost any day makes clear, many of these interests are still wrapped up in the old harmful, cost-shifting/benefit-borrowing paradigm. This paradigm is not suited to a hot, tiny, fragile, crowded, ark of a world.

The best hope is for emphatic, insistent, informed public involvement in issues involving the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement (GLWQA), which is being renegotiated now between the U.S. and Canada, should place great emphasis on public information and education. It should ensure that the public be inextricably involved in decisions regarding the future of the Great Lakes. The EPA, Environment Canada, and the International Joint Commission (along with the various departments and ministries of natural resources), knowing that the people are strongly behind them, can then use the best science with the utmost integrity to do what is necessary to save the Great Lakes.

The new GLWQA should make clear to all stakeholders, now and for all time, that that the Lakes are a public trust belonging to the people, and that the old economic system which shifted costs to and borrowed benefits from the natural world and from the future—for the enrichment of a few—will no longer apply. Individuals and corporations using the Great Lakes as a resource must not only pay the full cost of doing so, but must also, in addition to doing no harm, be instrumental in providing benefit to the ecosystem.

Smart companies, those with an interest in long term survival and profitability, already get this. Unfortunately, it seems that Gogebic Taconite and the Wisconsin legislature haven’t figured it out yet. Let’s hope they do soon.

If we “get the balance of authentically good ‘goods’ and ‘bads’ wrong, according to Haque, “the result won’t be prosperity, but deepening crisis and, perhaps eventual collapse.”

The above opinion is that of Jim Nies of both Whitewater, Wis. and Kakawong, Ont.  He cites the following as resources used in crafting his opinion: Umair Haque, The New Capitalist Manifesto (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2011); Paul Gilding, The Great Disruption (New York: Bloomsury Press, 2011); Bill McKibben, Eaarth (New York: Times Books, 2010); Bryan Smith, Peter Senge, et al, The Necessary Revolution (New York: Broadway Books, 2008); Joshua Hjartarson, et al, The Vital Commons (Toronto: Mowat Center, 2011, http://greatlakessummit.org/wp ).