Development, biospheric ethics and a new way forward

The 'development' currently imposed by the industrialised nations on the Third World is producing a whole series of interconnected negative impacts on the very people the process purports to help. In this paper, I will discuss two important strands in this complex weave of causes and effects: how 'aid' mainly benefits the industrialised world via the opening up of Third World markets for its manufactured goods, and the connections between 'development' and population increase in the Third World. I will also sketch out a new way forward based on a biospheric ethic inspired by the world's traditional cultures.

The fallacy of aid

Those with a superficial knowledge of the development process often remain convinced that aid is designed to help the peoples of the Third World. Even many environmental institutions still appear to believe this and persist in campaigning for increased aid. Yet, surely, if the governments of the industrial countries were really concerned with the welfare of the people of the Third World, they would have provided some of their vast food surpluses (which cost hundreds of millions of dollars to store) to the starving people of Africa - even if this would not have solved any long-term problems. Alternatively, they could have spent on famine relief the money which US farmers are now paid not to produce food.

Needless to say, no politician has suggested we do anything of the sort. On the contrary, in Britain, in 1985-86, in the face of the worst and most widespread famine Africa has ever known, our government actually reduced its aid to the people of that continent, so that, as John Madeley notes, "There is more in the kitty for better off countries such as Turkey and Mexico" (which, unlike the countries of Africa, have the money with which to buy British manufactured goods).

This ability to buy goods from the industrialised countries is the crux of the matter. Indeed, the US Department of Agriculture admits that American food aid is a means of creating a demand for imports from the US. "Food aid," it declares, "can pave the way for US commercial exports." For example, in 1956-58, United States food aid to 17 overseas markets was $3.1 billion, and commercial sales of all goods was $3.6 billion. Two decades later, food aid from the United States to these same countries was only $756 million, and commercial sales had grown to $43 billion.

Aid and trade

One of the main reasons why aid is sound commercial practice is that much of it is officially tied to sales of manufactured goods. In the same way that colonies were once forced to buy their manufactured goods from the country that had colonised them, today's recipients of aid must spend much of the money they receive (money that is supposed to relieve poverty and malnutrition) on irrelevant manufactured goods that are produced by the donor countries. What is more, if they dare refuse to buy any of our manufactured goods or to sell us some resource - generally, because they want to keep it for themselves or to conserve it for the future - they are immediately brought to heel by the simple expedient of threatening to cut off further aid, on which they have become increasingly dependent.

Thus, a few years ago, a World Health Organisation (WHO) study revealed that only a minute fraction of commercial pharmaceutical preparations were of any real therapeutic use. Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries of the world, decided to take the study seriously and announced that it would ban all superfluous drugs. The US government immediately reacted by threatening to withhold food aid if Bangladesh discriminated in this way against US pharmaceutical manufacturers. So too, in 1979, the Bangladesh government decided to stop selling rhesus monkeys (a threatened species) to a US company called Mol Enterprises for experimentation in its laboratories. The US government's response was, as New Scientist notes, "swift and strong" and "even included a suggestion that American aid could be cut off if Bangladesh refused to honour its contract with Mol Enterprises, the monkey importers."

The British government behaved in a similar manner with the government of India by threatening to cut off aid if India did not go ahead with plans to buy 21 Westland helicopters at a cost of £60 million - an effort which, it is encouraging to note, was bitterly opposed by responsible elements within the Overseas Development Administration.

All this is simply a slightly more sophisticated means of achieving what Commodore Perry achieved by bombarding Nagasaki in order to force the Japanese to trade with America, and what Britain achieved by going to war with China so as to force it to buy opium from British merchants in India.

Bretton Woods

It was at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, held under US leadership, that aid was institutionalised as the industrialised world's principal tool of economic colonialism. At that conference, 44 nations agreed to set up the key international institutions. They were: the International Monetary Fund (IMF); the World Bank (IBRD); and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). These highly interconnected 'agencies' formed a single integrative structure for manipulating world trade, which until the early seventies was basically dominated by the United States of America. The original role of the IMF was to make sure that member nations pegged their currency to the US dollar or to gold (72 percent of world gold supplies were in the possession of the US). This expedient would, among other things, make it difficult for Third World debtors to get out of their financial obligation to the Western banking system by manipulating their currencies.

The World Bank's first function was to reconstruct Europe's shattered economy after World War II. Its second function was to prevent the recurrence of a 1929-style slump by systematically expanding the Western economy. Significantly, as Susan George writes in her hook, A Fate Worse than Debt, Article 1 of the IMF charter prescribes six objectives, the principle being:

"to facilitate balanced growth of international trade and, through this, contribute to high levels of employment and real income and the development of productive capacity ... To seek the elimination of exchange restrictions that hinder the growth of world trade.

She goes on to comment,

"Even those objectives described in the first Article that may appear strictly financial are, in fact, geared to a single overriding objective: the growth and development of world trade."

As a result, the World Bank soon moved into the business of Third World development (its main activity). It has built roads, harbours, ports, and so on - to supply the infrastructure required to enable the importation of manufactured products and the export of raw materials and agricultural produce. It then invested heavily in energy generation, in particular in hydropower, the adverse consequences of which have been documented in our book The Social and Environmental Effects of Large Dams (Vols 1-3).

More recently, since the 1970s, the Bank has played a leading role in financing the commercialisation of agriculture in the Third World and, in particular, the substitution of export-oriented plantations and livestock-rearing schemes for traditional subsistence farming designed to feed local people. In doing this, it has made a massive contribution to the growth of poverty and famine in Africa and South and Southeast Asia.

The role of GATT, the third of the institutions set up at Bretton Woods, was to liberalise trade and, hence, to ensure that Third World countries did not try to manufacture locally what they could buy from Western countries - that is, indulge in highly frowned-upon 'import substitution'.

IMF conditionalities

The IMF has complemented the work of GATT in this respect. Loans, either from the IMF itself or the World Bank, have only been provided to governments that have undertaken to observe the IMF 'conditionalities'. This has meant above all, abolishing import quotas and reducing import tariffs to a minimum. This prevents Third World countries from protecting their fledgling industries against competition from the established and highly capitalised enterprises of the industrial world - industries that during the early stages of their own development were themselves well-protected from foreign competition, and many of which still are.

Third World governments have also been required to devalue their currencies to make their exports more attractive to the industrialised countries - which means they must pay more for their imports. They are also required to abolish expenditure on social welfare and, in particular, on food subsidies which are often badly needed to protect the mass of the population from the disruptive effects of the rapid socio-economic changes that development inevitably brings about. Such expenditure is seen as being better spent on Western imports or on building up a country's industrial infrastructure.

If the Fund were really interested in the fate of the people of the Third World, it would not cut down on food subsidies to the poorest people of the world, most of whom only need food handouts because they have been deprived of their land to make way for large-scale development schemes (largely funded by the West), and the import of nonessential items - armaments being a prime example. Yet, as Susan George notes,

"The IMF consistently demands that its pupils make drastic reductions in civil spending, but arms budgets remain untouched. When asked about this anomaly, Fund personnel recoil and explain in pained tones that such measures would be "interfering in the internal affairs of sovereign nations" (which is exactly what the Fund does every working day)."

Similarly, the IMF could insist on a purge on corruption in Third World governments and, in particular, 'capital flight', which could be responsible for the loss of as much as $100 billion a year.

Apart from being made to devalue their currencies and cut social expenditure, Third World governments must also undertake to mechanise their food production - that is, to adopt the 'Green Revolution', thus providing an important market for Western agricultural machinery and agro-chemicals. They must also replace subsistence agriculture with export-oriented agriculture so as to provide the West with agricultural produce. (Third World countries must export in any case to pay for the capital equipment they need to mechanise their agriculture and to finance the mass of manufactured goods that now flows into their countries.)

This package of policy prescriptions has been imposed on Third World countries by all the multilateral development banks. Rupesinghe, for example, quotes a report by the Asian Development Bank on SE Asia's economy:

"Countries must move away from inefficient import substitution policies and free the economy of import controls and price controls. The Green Revolution must be promoted as a 'genuine dynamic force' of economic development. Agribusiness should be invited to cooperate in a country's drive towards self-sufficiency. Resource allocations must shift from domestic production to export crops for the world market. Local support, generous tax incentives, profit registrations, should be provided for foreign investors, and legislation must be enacted to create a climate of stability for foreign investment."

Recycling capital

Since the early seventies, the amount of capital pumped into the Third World to finance such development policies has increased massively, as has the destruction it has financed. One reason for this capital expenditure is the need to recycle the vast sums of money accumulated by the OPEC countries into the Western economic system.

This is fully admitted by the US government in one of its publications:

"In the 1970s the large increase in petroleum prices gave rise to large amounts of what were called petrodollars, since petroleum was (and still is) paid for in dollars. Commercial bankers were enjoined by the United States and international agencies such as the International Monetary Fund to reloan or recycle these dollars to keep the international economy from collapsing. This they did to a fault, giving rise to what later came to be known as the international debt crisis."

Unfortunately, the process is about to be repeated, since, with the aid of the World Bank, we now plan to recycle, via the economies of Third World countries, Japan's annual $80 billion surplus - which is equivalent to the OPEC surpluses of the late 1970s.

The impact that the vast development schemes (which alone can sop up all that money) must inevitably have on the already devastated environment of the Third World is too awful to contemplate.

The population explosion

An essential reason why economic development cannot help combat malnutrition and famine is that it must inevitably give rise to a population explosion. The experience has been the same everywhere. As soon as a traditional society embarks on the path of economic development, its population simply explodes. It happened in Britain (where the population was under 8 million when the Industrial Revolution began), where it increased by more than 7 times before it eventually stabilised. It is happening today wherever economic development occurs throughout the Third World.

Our reaction to this problem is always the same. Population growth is interpreted in such a way as to make it appear amenable to a technological solution - the only solution the North is organised to provide. It is the only solution that involves producing the sort of hardware that the corporations into which our society is organised can manufacture; the only type of solution, in fact, that is 'economic' and hence politically acceptable.

The World Bank estimates that to achieve

"a rapid fertility decline in Sub-Saharan Africa would mean increasing the amount of money spent on 'family planning' by 20 times by the end of the century."

Just think how the export of contraceptive pills, condoms, IUDs and other forms of birth-control gadgetry will rocket. Is it possible to imagine a more 'economically viable' and 'politically expedient' solution? But what is the point of providing vast numbers of men and women with expensive birth-control devices if, as happens to be the case, they want the children whose birth these devices are designed to prevent? The answer is clearly none at all.

Stable populations

We tend to forget that the populations of traditional societies were stable for centuries, if not millennia. They had to be, in order to preserve their social structure and their physical environment. The reasons for that stability are clear.

To begin with, traditional society exploited a wide range of cultural strategies - such as taboos against sexual activity during lactation and during the first years of widowhood, or the prohibition against widow remarriage among certain castes in India - which are intended to minimise population growth. However, as a society's social structure and cultural pattern are destroyed by the process of economic development, such population control strategies can no longer operate, which means that the population in question simply grows out of control.

The population of traditional societies is stable for another reason, namely that each individual belongs to an extended family and lineage group which provide an extraordinary degree of security. What is more, each individual has a right to the land they and their family occupy by virtue of their status as a member of these groupings. In addition, the agricultural methods used are designed to maximise security even at the cost of limiting yields.

Development and alienation

Development changes all that. In fact, it shatters every aspect of traditional life. Indeed, it is a process which, as Robertson notes, is "more likely to generate unhappiness, violence and tyranny than social harmony." Esenstadt also considers that because

"modernisation entails continual changes in all major spheres of a society, [this] means, of necessity, that it involves processes of disorganisation and dislocation, with the continual development of social problems, cleavages and conflicts between various groups and movements of protest and resistance to change. Disorganisation and dislocation thus constitute a basic part of modernisation, and every modern and modernising society has to cope with them."

In particular, development destroys a society's cultural pattern and its associated social structure. The society thus disintegrates and becomes atomised, as in the industrialised world today. Such a society can no longer govern itself, nor provide its members with the security that it previously provided: instead it must now be governed by a government bureaucracy, which previously would have no raison d'etre.

Such a bureaucracy, however, can never compensate people for the inestimable social capital provided to them by the social groupings to which they previously belonged. Nor can participation in the formal economy, usually as grossly underpaid casual workers, compensate people for the loss of their land - which is inevitably taken over to accommodate more economic land uses. All this creates the most terrible misery and insecurity, and in order to survive, people are forced to seek an alternative strategy for providing themselves with some sort of security, however precarious. One such strategy is to have more children, who can be hired out as labourers or who can even be trained to beg and steal in the cities.

Malthusian dogma

Interestingly enough, one of the official explanations of the population explosion is that, with development, food production increases, which means that more food is available to the local population which, in a true Malthusian manner, can be counted upon to breed up to the available food supplies. The opposite, however, seems to be true. Thus, although food production has increased in, for example, both India and Zimbabwe in the last decade, this has not meant that more food has been made available to the local population. On the contrary, the food has mainly been produced for export or for consumption in the cities and, in reality, as both Banjeree and Kothari and Jackson point out, less food is available to the rural masses.

This was also the case in Ireland, when, during the 18th and early 19th centuries, the population exploded from 2 to 8 million. During that period much of the arable land was taken away from the peasants by the big estates, with the result that the peasants had to rely on the potato, the only crop that could feed a family from the small area of degraded land that remained at its disposal. During the course of the 19th century, an increasing proportion of food produced in Ireland was exported to England; the exports were in no way reduced during the famine, which killed something like 2 million people and forced another 2 million to seek refuge beyond the seas.

The truth seems to be that, in an atomised society at least, the population explodes not when there is more food to eat (as conventional wisdom tells us) but when, on the contrary, there is less food to eat.

The demographic transition

Of course, we are assured that development will provide people with a new form of security, one provided by membership in the growing formal economy. As people become more secure, we are told, they will then have fewer children, as has happened in the West. What the development industry does not tell us, however, is that it is economic development that created the insecurity in the first place.

To assume that the 'demographic transition' will occur in the Third World is in any case an act of faith. We are not at all sure why the population rate has fallen in the West. Is the fall in fact due to increased security? Or are other factors implicated, such as the fear of the future which looks ever grimmer? Or even the serious pollution of human spermatozoa which has radically reduced the sperm count of young males in the Western world and made a considerable proportion of them 'functionally sterile'?

Moreover, the economy of the Third World is not expanding nearly fast enough to absorb the growing hordes of unemployed in the cities and is never likely to; hence the security that participation in the formal economy could provide is available to an ever smaller proportion of the population. Indeed, the Third World can never conceivably attain the level of material prosperity we know at present in the West, which has indeed been associated (however superficially) with a reduction in fertility.

What is certain is that the much anticipated 'demographic transition' is not occurring in the Third World today. As Lester Brown notes:

"The 'demographic transition' that has marked the advance of all developed countries may be reversed for the first time in modern history. African countries have now moved beyond the first stage of this transition, with the equilibrium between high birth and death rates. But virtually all remain stuck in the second stage, with high birth rates and low death rates. In this stage, population growth typically peaks at three percent or so per year."

If the rate of population growth has fallen slightly in the dry tropics today, it is probably because of an increased death rate from famine, malnutrition and the diseases to which underfed people are particularly vulnerable. Indeed, it is only through such crude means that development can help control the very population explosion that it has itself brought about.

Impact of consumption

Even if the demographic transition did occur, it could not conceivably solve the real problem. A growing population is not intolerable per se but because of the increasing impact it must have on the natural environment. This impact is greatly magnified by the increase in material consumption made possible by economic development. To seek to reduce population by systematically encouraging economic development is thus self-defeating since it can only increase consumption and thus environmental destructiveness.

The new way forward

These two quite clearly misguided policies (on aid and on population) are symptomatic of the current 'development ethic' which propagates the notion that the solution to all of humanity's problems lies in more and more economic growth, particularly in those parts of the world where sustainable, traditional cultures once flourished before they were forced to participate in the world market.

How can we reverse the devastating effects of development on the Third World, and indeed on the industrialised countries themselves?

The answer is that we need to return to a low energy, low resource, low pollution society - and very quickly; such a society must necessarily conduct its economic and indeed its political affairs on a very much smaller scale - which means catering to a very much smaller market. The correct unit for economic activity is clearly the family and to a lesser extent the community. It is only in this way that economic activities can satisfy social, religious and ecological needs - not merely narrow economic ones as is necessarily the case when they are fulfilled by corporations.

Since humans, during 95 percent of their tenancy on this planet, have lived in tribal societies that conducted their economic activities in precisely this way, it seems clear that we must derive our inspiration from that experience. If we examine the way traditional peoples conducted their affairs, we will see that in general they are difficult to improve on. My colleague Nicholas Hildyard and I studied traditional irrigation systems and wrote about them in our book The Social and Environmental Effect of Large Dams. This is clearly the case with their agricultural and horticultural and indeed pastoral practices in general. The literature on this subject is enormous and all of it tends to confirm this thesis.

The basis of the sustainable lifestyles of tribal or 'vernacular' societies was undoubtedly the observance of traditional laws which were seen to maintain the order of the Cosmos. So long as that order was maintained, then people prospered: if it was perturbed, if 'the balance of nature' was upset, then disaster inevitably followed.

The vernacular person's fundamental role in life was thus to maintain the order of the Cosmos by performing prescribed rituals, taking part in the prescribed ceremonies and in general by observing traditional laws of society. People understood this law to be a moral one, and one which applied not only to human beings but also to nature and, indeed, to the Cosmos itself.

What is moral behaviour?

Father Placide Tempels in his celebrated book Bantu Philosophy notes:

"Moral behaviour for the Bantu is behaviour that serves to maintain the order of the Cosmos and hence that maximises human welfare: Immoral behaviour is that which reduces its order, thereby threatening human welfare ... "

This statement could apply equally well to vernacular societies in all parts of the world. In many of these societies, the pattern of behaviour that is judged to be ethical was referred to by a word that both denotes the order of the Cosmos and, at the same time, the 'path' or 'Way' that must be followed in order to maintain it.

Among the Ancient Greeks the word used was Dike, which also meant 'righteousness' or 'justice'. The Chinese Tao is a very similar concept which refers to the daily and yearly 'revolution of the heavens'. According to de Groot, Tao

'represents all that is correct, normal or right in the universe; it does indeed never deviate from its course. It consequently includes all correct and righteous dealings of men and spirits, which alone promote universal happiness and life.'

All other acts, as they oppose the Tao, are "incorrect, abnormal, unnatural" and they must bring "misfortune on the bad."

The Buddhist notion of Dharma, the Persian Asha and the Vedic Rita are very similar concepts: all refer to the Way that human beings must follow if they are to maintain the order of the Cosmos, the only Way that is truly moral since to maintain it is to assure the welfare of the world of living things, while to diverge from it can only cause disasters like floods, droughts, epidemics and wars.

Although many tribal peoples do not appear to have formulated the notion of the Way in so explicit a manner, their notion of morality remains the same. Moral behaviour is still that which conforms to the traditional law and which, at the same time, serves to maintain the order of the Cosmos. Immoral behaviour, on the other hand, is that which is taboo. Roger Caillois writes,

"An act is taboo if it disrupts the universal order which is at once that of nature and society... as-a result the Earth might no longer yield a harvest, the cattle might be struck with infertility, the stars might no longer follow their appointed course, death and disease could stalk the land."

'Progress' (or the economic development with which it is equated) is quite clearly immoral and hence opposed to the 'Way' because it involves the systematic substitution of the technosphere or manmade world for the biosphere or natural world from which it derives its resources and to which it consigns its ever more voluminous and ever more toxic waste products. As the technosphere expands, so must the biosphere disintegrate and contract. Economic growth, in fact, is a measure of biospheric disintegration and contraction. The two processes are but different sides of the same coin.

This means that the ethic of progress - in effect, the ethic of perpetual technospheric expansion - is in reality no more than an ethic of biospheric destruction. It is not an 'evolutionary ethic,' as Waddington and Huxley saw it. On the contrary, it is an anti-evolutionary ethic. It serves to sanctify the reversal of the evolutionary process.

A biospheric ethic

A biospheric ethic, an ethic compatible with the ecological view of the world we live in, would be very different from that proposed by the industrialised world view. It would above all be one which enables humans to assist in the achievement of Gaia's overall goal of maintaining the biosphere's stability or homeostasis in the face of change, whereas immoral behaviour would be that which reduces Gaian homeostasis and hence disrupts the basic structure of the Cosmos.

The question now is: how can the critical transition of industrialised society to one based on a biospheric ethic be achieved? The answer is only by the adoption of a carefully integrated programme, and we must assume, however unlikely it may be, that it will be adopted by the government of a major industrial nation.

The programme, as we shall see, will have to be divided into distinct parts. These will all be initiated at the same time, though they will proceed at a different pace as they encounter different degrees of inertia. By its very nature, however, the programme would have to be stretched out over a considerable period of time. One cannot transform a society overnight in an orderly way. In addition, the programme would have to be accepted as a whole. One cannot phase out non-sustainable activities without causing all sorts of problems such as inflation and unemployment, unless at the same time one phases in, to replace them, other more sustainable ones. Nor can one phase in the latter without first phasing out the former so as to free labour and resources for this purpose.

For that reason, it is naive to suppose that a government elected for a five-year period can implement anything more than a patchwork of short-term expedients. It is essential that it obtain from the electorate a mandate to implement at least the first part of the programme. To obtain such a mandate, it must first of all make the electorate clearly aware of the extreme gravity of the global situation and hence of its own national one - which, so far, governments throughout the world have systematically played down.

A programme for change

If the programme is to be fully integrated it must be designed to reverse all the essential trends set in motion by the industrial process. The programme can be shown to consist of six functionally distinct stages (though it is not suggested that they actually occur in that order, since positive feedback would cause them to be constantly affecting each other).

The first stage is the development of a very specific world view, whose main features we have already briefly outlined. As Weber was the first to point out, without the current technologically based world view, there would probably have been no industrialisation.

A new world view must replace it. A study of the value systems of traditional stable societies reveals that, though they may vary in many details, their basic features are very similar. In fact it can be shown that, for society to remain stable, a number of basic principles must underlie the world view upon which is based its stable relationship with its social and physical environment. Let us briefly consider the basic principles underlying the aberrant world view of industrialism, in order to see how they may be modified to give rise to an adaptive and hence stable social behaviour pattern.

Humanism

It is essential to the world view of industrialism that humans should not be regarded as an integral part of nature but rather as above it, and thereby largely exempt from the laws governing the behaviour of other forms of life on this planet. To justify this, industrialists can postulate a number of abstract entities whose possession by humans is supposed to distinguish them from the other, less fortunate forms of life. Thus only humans have a soul, they alone display consciousness, their behaviour is supposed to be intelligent, while that of other forms of life is said to be governed by 'blind' instinct. Only human societies are supposed to be capable of cultural behaviour.

Such notions are unknown among traditional societies for whom nature is holy and cannot be disrupted without incurring the wrath of the gods. It is by desanctifying nature that it has become socially feasible to destroy it, and by sanctifying human progress in its stead that the process has been able to proceed at the present disastrous pace. For 'humanism' we must substitute 'naturalism' - respect for the natural world of which we are an integral but only a modest part.

Individualism

Individualism is the notion that a person's duties are primarily to him or herself. This notion is in keeping with our total ignorance of the nature of natural systems of which we are a part: the family, the community and ecosystem, and of how they are related to each other. For an individual to be a member of a community, his or her behaviour must be subjected to the appropriate set of constraints. A community is an organisation.

As such it displays order, defined as the influence of the whole over the parts. This influence is achieved by subjecting the parts to constraints which will limit their range of choices by causing them to become differentiated. 'Individualism' is another word for chaos. It is unacceptable in a stable self-regulating society, as it is in any stable self-regulating natural system. For 'individualism' we must substitute 'communitarianism' - the need to subject what may appear to be our individual interests to those of the community and the ecosystem.

Materialism

Materialism is closely related to individualism. In traditional societies people's goals are largely social. The accumulation of material goods plays no part in the strategy of their lives. Material goods only become necessary when they are required for the purpose of satisfying biological and social needs. Karl Marx was wrong when he referred to religion as the opiate of the people. People have always been religious. Religion is an essential part of their sociability, which assures the stability of their social environment. It is not religion, in fact, but materialism that is the opiate of the people.

Scientism

Scientism is the notion that scientific knowledge can serve as the basis for social and ecological control. Let us not forget that there is no precedent for stable societies based on objective scientific information. Until now they have invariably been based on traditional and very subjective information designed to adapt a particular society to its specific environment, rather than all societies to all environments. It can be shown that only such cultural information satisfies basic cybernetic requirements.

We must develop increasing respect for the information organised into the cultural pattern of remaining traditional societies. This is essential to the task of social decentralisation. For 'scientism', in fact, we must substitute 'culturalism'.

Technologism

The notion that there is a technological solution to all our problems is a myth closely associated with scientism, since the solutions which scientific information can give rise to are technological ones. These, however, can play no part in the strategy of nature. We must develop instead a quasi-religious respect for the natural systems that make up the biosphere, whose normal functioning provides the only lasting solution to such problems.

Institutionalism

This myth is also closely related to the preceding ones. If benefits are material and technological, then one must create the optimum conditions in which they can be dispensed. Such conditions do not exist in the home, or in a vernacular community. Therefore institutions are set up to provide them. Ignorance of social and ecological cybernetics leads to the essential self-regulating nature of natural systems being ignored, while it is assumed that their control can be more effectively assured by institutions - that is, external or asystemic controls. For institutionalism we must also substitute a respect for the self-regulating nature of natural systems - a key component of culturalism and ecologism.

Economism

Economism is the notion that things must be done because they are economic - that is, so as to maximise the return on capital or on other factors of production. This notion is totally consistent with the others. If all benefits are material, technological or institutional, economic growth must be the means of maximising them and hence of best promoting human welfare. For 'economism' must be substituted 'ecologism', the notion that things must be done to satisfy not a single end but all the basic (often competing) requirements of the community and its natural environment.

Reform of the educational system is needed to assure the general adoption of the new world view. It would have to become considerably more decentralised, and the curriculum would also be changed so that the accent might shift from the random accumulation of data to the acquisition of the cultural information favouring the appropriate socialisation process.

• The second stage in the implementation of this new way forward is the development of the technology required for achieving its goals. What is required is a shift - from capital intensive industry to developing the 'appropriate' technology for decentralised living.
• The third stage is the transformation of society so that instead of satisfying the requirements of the production - consumption process, it would once more be composed of people who are, above all, members of families, communities and ecosystems, and whose behaviour is basically that required to satisfy the requirements of these systems and hence of the larger system of which they are a part, the biosphere. The process will come about automatically as society is decentralised and conditions are created in favour of the restoration of the family, the community and the ecosystem, at which point economic activities will gradually become subordinated to social ones.
• The fourth stage is to reverse the system of capital generation, by means of the production-consumption process. Some capital will undoubtedly be required to finance the early stages of the programme designed to prevent social and economic collapse, and to modify the infrastructure of society in such a way as to favour its decentralisation. Slowly the need for capital will be reduced as systemic resources replace asystemic ones.
• The fifth stage is the reversal of the process which built up the industrialised world: by radically reducing the scale of the production process and producing goods that are ever less destructive to the natural environment.
• The sixth stage is reducing the scale of technological activities to permit the restoration of the self-regulating social systems which make up the natural world, on the basis of whose normal functioning these problems could be solved.