About 9 months ago I quit my teaching job (sociology, college) and became my companion’s business partner. He makes custom mountain jewelry and we’re making our (little, challenging and fulfilling) living through web sales. I’m the webmistress/business person.

The change threw me into a panic, even a spiritual/intellectual crisis of sorts, having had a more typical take on capitalism, competition, making money, etc. What I’d say now is that it’s easy to have theories and opinions when you’re handed a paycheck - you get a false sense of not participating in the system. When your every activity is about attracting folks to buy the stuff you make so that you can eat and keep the internet connected and the electricity on, etc., then you do see capitalism as natural, in it’s distilled and simple form (making, selling and buying stuff).

Barter was an earlier form (and something we still do - I recently made a website for an artist and got a painting in exhange). And there were hard bargaining and monopolistic types then too, for instance the Tlingit Indians of the northwest. They also warred and had generational slaves.

This whole primitivist thing makes me think of the old standard, “The grass is always greener…”, and more exotic and therefore more interesting. I live near the southernmost glacier in north america (Palisade). It’s vanishing. But is anyone studying it? A few folks, but the geologists with clout are all off studying the more hip ones in the far off places.

~ Lauren

As people like to say nowadays, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure this out. The people who keep track of these things and make it their business to predict such things agree that the human population is going to increase to ten billion by the end of the century. It isn’t just the doom-sayers who say this. This is a very conservative estimate, recently endorsed by the UN. Unfortunately, most of the people who make this estimate seem to have the idea that this is workable and okay.

Here’s why it isn’t.

It’s obvious that it costs a lot of money and energy to produce all the food we need to maintain our population at six billion. But there is an additional, hidden cost that has to be counted in life forms. Put plainly, in order to maintain the biomass that is tied up in the six billion of us, we have to gobble up 200 species a day–in addition to all the food we produce in the ordinary way. We need the biomass of those 200 species to maintain this biomass, the biomass that is in us. And when we’ve gobbled up those species, they’re gone. Extinct. Vanished forever.

In other words, maintaining a population of six billion humans costs the world 200 species a day. If this were something that was going to stop next week or next month, that would be okay. But the unfortunate fact is that it’s not. It’s something that’s going to go on happening every day, day after day after day–and that’s what makes it unsustainable, by definition. That kind of cataclysmic destruction cannot be sustained.

…

But all too many people–most people, I’m afraid–tend to think, “Well, so what? Humans belong to an order of being that is separate from the rest of the living community. Since we’re separate, it doesn’t matter how many species we destroy–and since we’re superior to them anyway, we’re actually improving the world by eliminating them!”

We’re like people living in the penthouse of a tall brick building. Every day we need 200 bricks to maintain our walls, so we go downstairs, knock 200 bricks out of the walls below and bring them back upstairs for our own use. Every day. . . . Every day we go downstairs and knock 200 bricks out of the walls that are holding up the building we live in. Seventy thousand bricks a year, year after year after year.

I hope it’s evident that this is not a sustainable way to maintain a brick building. One day, sooner or later, it’s going to collapse, and the penthouse is going to come down along with all the rest.

Making 200 species extinct every day is similarly not a sustainable way to maintain a living community. Even if we’re in some sense at the top of that community, one day, sooner or later, it’s going to collapse, and when it does, our being at the top won’t help us. We’ll come down along with all the rest.

Here, Quinn is talking about something much more frightening than I am: an ecological collapse, where we’re not dealing with the end of our civilization and some die-off, but the extinction of our species, and most of our ecosystems with us. That makes the collapse of civilization look like a walk in the park. Now I differ from Quinn: humans are extremely resilient, but civilization is incredibly fragile. I think our civilization will fold well before we face that kind of nightmare. But these are the stakes we’re talking about. This is what we mean when we talk about nature being “in balance,” or civilization disrupting that balance. I think in its purest form, capitalism might emulate a kind of ecosystem. Unlike many other primitivists, I have no problem with capitalism–the problems with it are the problems of any agricultural economy, and they stem from the nature of agricultural production, and are shared by feudalism, patronage, Communism, and every other system that a farmer has ever used. But the metaphor breaks down because unlike the market, the ecology is more than just an abstraction or a game. It is real. It’s the foundation of everything else. We can live happily without a market, but without an ecosystem, there is nothing. We can’t knock our own foundation out from underneath ourselves, and expect that pattern to continue for very long.