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Conducting Business as
if the Environment Didn’t Matter
by Frank J. Regan (October
2, 2007)
Bernard Vaissičre: "Yes, the Bees Could Disappear" “Friday 07
September 2007 “Bee populations are declining all over the
world. That fact has been known for a long time and the press has
recently latched onto the subject. Bernard Vaissičre, an Inra
[French National Institute for Agricultural Research] researcher and
one of very few French pollination specialists, evaluates this
question for Futura-Sciences.”
The main news
about Bee Colony Collapse Disorder is that there is no simple
answer. More is that it maybe just a single straw in world of lots
of causes. We tend to live in a world where a problem occurs, like
the global decline of bee populations and just figure that
scientists will go out and find out the answer and fix it. Well,
it’s never that simple and this morass defines environmental our
problems. According to the above article by TruthOut.org a specific
disease appears at first glance to be the problem (actually a
marker), but the real problem is probably the overall degradation of
our environment due to an overload of toxins we have been pouring
into our world for quite awhile now.
Kind of related to
this bee problem and just because I’m reading this book at the
moment--
Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World by Alan Greenspan
-it seems to an uneducated economist as me, that a really simple
question occurs. Why hasn’t our environment—brownfields left by
industries, pollution, and the horrific state our environment is in
today—not really factored into the economic thinking of economic
leaders and thinkers? As I read Greenspan’s book, I continually
look for any concern that the natural resources that we need to
survive have any reality in the world of economists.
The answer, though
I am not an expert, is all around us: Some countries are doing great
economically, some OK, some horribly—but all are enduring massive
environmental collapse and it doesn’t even enter into the
bookkeeping of corporations or the Federal Reserve Chairman. Take
trees, water, air—all these natural resources are treated in modern
economics as invisible resources whose degradation have no
consequences. In fact, as Greenspan suggests when a lake goes dead
and you can’t drink the water, swim, or eat the fish, these events
are just creative disasters, where a used-up market begins afresh
and takes off on a new profitable and rapacious direction. In other
words, it keeps an economy healthy when a new market comes along
like the telegraph, when it has been blown away by the telephone.
There will be
‘disasters’ like people in the telegraph business who can’t adapt to
the new paradigm, but the economy will be the better for it because
of new innovations, new energy, whatever. As so, I must assume,
when a market, say the lumbering industry that depends on millions
of trees collapses because no one cared or thought of intelligent
management of that resource gets replaced by the plastics industry
and leaves behind a wasteland of destroyed watersheds (because there
are no longer any tree root systems to hold back flooding, like what
is happening in China) that has little effect on the global
economy—except making people look for newer and more streamline
markets to churn up.
I guess my whole
point in this essay is that despite the ravages that our global
economy is creating on our environment, just as long as our economy
is doing OK, then everything is OK. Ah, no it’s not.
***You can respond
to this essay on
Environmental Thoughts
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