#8 - The Natural Capital Crisis

Many of the economics of today depend on questions of 'how much wealth do we have'. The economy of a nation is determined by how much it produces or how many customers they serve. The metrics comes down to estimating the value in monetary growth; “how much have we made the past year?” The purpose is to measure the increase in value of our country and to take pride in false since of economic security. The reality of the matter is that we are losing value rather than gaining value. There are valuable resources being destroyed in order to provide the next fad technology, or extravagant lifestyles that are only allowed due to the perceived economic wealth of the country. Economics is essentially limited by physics. Matter can neither be created or destroyed. So if the economy is growing, it is growing at the expense of something else. Natural capital is the energy that fuels economic growth, and the fact that the world doesn't put a value on our natural capital is leading to crisis.

Mountain Top Remmoval For Coal Stripping the Land Bare

Ignoring the true value of the nation has been done before throughout its history. One can put forward that slavery was a crisis of human capital, not just a moral or sovereignty challenge. Lincoln didn’t argue against the morals of slavery, but the economics of slavery. If you could get a slave to complete a hard labor task, there would be no reason to invest in more efficient machine or system to replace the laborer. In the system of slavery, the labor is free and inherited like property. Why buy an expensive machine to farm tobacco, when we have free labor to do the same work? The system was ultimately unsustainable for the simple fact that because there was no value in the human capitol there would be no value in investing in it. For the exception of the slaves brought up to do more administrative task, slaves were not educated by their masters and were only giving enough food and clothing to efficiently complete the labor required of them.

The Crisis of Human Capital in the U.S.

Now if this is starting to sound familiar too you, then maybe not all hope is loss. Right now we have reached a new false stability in our economic system. It is the crisis of natural capital. Just look at the energy industry and you can see the parallels of abuse of the environment similar to how the system abused the slaves. Things such as trees, mountains, streams, and ground water cease to be describing in the romantic sense but in such grim terms as factors of production, sites, and raw materials. Nature is full of things to be used up and toss to the nearest landfill or storage facility.  There is no planning for how to take care of those resources or rather the water used as coolant will recharge, or the heat gained by the waste water won’t kill off plant and wildlife. These things are not considered because the world decapitalizes the value of nature in preference to that of financial capital (a societal construct to place a unifying value on things).

Natural Slavery

Look at some of the problems arising from not valuing our capital; nuclear waste, acid rain, smog, lead poisoning, asbestos,  CFCs, greenhouse gas emissions, drab bleak suburbia, deforestation, mountain blasting, asthma from dirty air, and the list can go on forever. To draw a parallel to the crisis of human capital, what were the various negative impacts of that period: oppression, unequal rights, illiteracy, racism, discrimination, poverty, health concerns, violence, and etc. The effects of slavery are still being experience today, and the effects of the natural capital crisis will definitely be similar in scope especially if the crisis isn’t solved. 
     A quick glance at current events, such as BP Gulf Oil Spill or Arkansas Fracking Earthquakes, reveal that problems are beginning to pile up. The problems of devaluing our natural resources in favor of economic growth from decades past are just now beginning to take hold.  The system has to allow for a change in how we value things and it can’t just be monetary. There is value in natural resources outside of being a factor of production mainly because we are part the environmental system. The same resources destroyed in the production of coal, is used to produce oxygen, provide a sense of wellbeing. The same waste water released into the environment, eventually leads back to us in drinking water. We should really start making the tough decision to tackle the natural capital crisis before it becomes another human capital crisis.

"We should really start making the tough decision to tackle the natural capital crisis before it becomes another human capital crisis."