Why are the birds and the beasts of the forest not stewards too?
Why must anyone be responsible for Earth?
In this issue [vol. 109 no1203 Summer 2002] we have explored the related ideas of humanity's common good and its stewardship of the Earth. These are core areas of modern human concern. But they are areas in which the present conventions of economic science give it little to say. This is a big problem, because it blocks clear thinking where much complex thinking is going on. We have seen stewardship is an important concept, yet it seems in several respects to be found wanting and insufficient. It is a concept and a purpose which is easily co-opted. It is easy for regressive interests to present it as their heavy burden for their onerous private bearing and therefore as a public favour generously done, a responsibility more-than-shouldered one that's due public recognition and if possible public subsidy. We see that stewardship serves as the weekday cloak of landed privilege.
Stewardship ignores the equal right of all life on Earth in favour of our own species. It is often an action of selective concern frequently offered in the non-ecological land managers excuse note. We might ask why it is that the human community in particular is charged with the duty of stewardship. Why not, somehow, the birds and the beasts of the forest too? Why, indeed, must anyone or anything at all be responsible for the Earth?
It is George Monbiot who explains it is we who are responsible for the Earth, because it is we, humanity, who have the power to destroy it. That destruction might come by the biggest of bangs, or the lightest of straws. With power comes responsibility. The greater the power, the greater the responsibility and that is why we are the stewards of Earth and why stewardship falls on us. Stewardship is a necessary but insufficient declaration of humanity's place on Earth, what more is needed?
The concept of covenant has also been raised in these pages. A covenant is an agreement or understanding. The idea helps us to understand that there are two sides to our place on Earth. Mankind's covenant is the gifting of the Earth to us. It is the gift which in fact requires our stewardship. So we learn that we are just as duty-bound to the enjoyment of covenant the full and common enjoyment of the gift of nature and community as we are to the requirement of stewardship. How might that gift be received? These questions bring us to the economics of stewardship and covenant. That is to say to the economics of gift and responsibility. This is the point to which mainstream economics must now turn its attention. Its help is needed to frame the answers to these questions.
The gift of all that nature and community provides is a common gift. We must respond in kind. We must conclude the bargain. People must return the gift of the benefits they receive from the common resource, as a rent paid for what they receive. That part of the covenant which we each monopolise, and so withhold from all others´ use, must be paid for, and its value returned to the intergenerational common pot.
The science of economics must become less abstract and obscure than its practitioners have lately made it. What it has to say must become more meaningful to people both in their daily lives and in their more reflective moments. It must be solidly grounded on the whole of our human social existence. Its purpose must be to explain to us the fundamental nature of that existence. By doing this, it must direct us in the best ways of managing our social affairs. And that must start with our individual place in society on Earth. The practice of economics must have humanity's common good firmly in mind. People need to be put at the heart of economics.
Peter Gibb.
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