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Jonathon Porritt, Founder Director of Forum for the Future, the UK’s leading sus-
tainable development charity, is an eminent writer, broadcaster and commentator
on sustainable development, and a leading adviser to business and government.
In July 2000, he was appointed by the Prime Minister as Chairman of the new
UK Sustainable Development Commission, the Government’s principal source of
independent advice across the whole sustainable development agenda. He is also
Co-director of The Prince of Wales’s Business and the Environment Programme,
a member of the Board of the South West Regional Development Agency, and
a Non-executive Director of Wessex Water. Porritt was formerly Co-chair of the
Green Party (1980–83), Director of Friends of the Earth (1984–90), Chairman
of UNED-UK (1993–96), Chairman of Sustainability South West (1999–2001)
and a Trustee of WWF-UK (1991–2005). Porritt received a CBE in January 2000
for services to environmental protection.
 Praise for Capitalism as if the World Matters

‘The world is on the brink of a vast and mostly unpleasant change that may mark
the end of the present civilization. To renew and rebuild, we need to listen to the
voices of the few truly selfless and thoughtful individuals among us, and Jonathon
Porritt is one of them. His vision is much more optimistic than mine, which sees
the need for a massive retreat from all development, sustainable or otherwise, if
we are to avoid another dark age on a torrid and mostly uninhabitable Earth.’
James Lovelock, creator of the GAIA theory

‘We need more people like Porritt . . . prepared to . . . find the best ways to save
both the environment and the capitalist system’
Professional Investor

‘Jonathon Porritt’s book could not have come at a more timely and critical moment
. . . A vital contribution to the most compelling issue of our times.’
Will Hutton, author of The Writing on the Wall: China and the West
in the 21st Century

‘No US authors have matched this book’s treatment of the interconnections

between the environment, finance and economy, industry and technology,
psychology and politics. Porritt depicts chilling vignettes, and decries greed and
unbridled materialism without impugning business as a whole . . . The book,
which closes with persuasive philosophical evocations and tactical guidelines,
invites and repays detailed study.’
F. T. Manheim, George Mason University, in Choice

‘. . . provocative and always interesting manifesto for a society that will not destroy
the conditions for its own survival . . . he is vigorously passionate in describing
the catastrophic dangers of global warming or the unsustainability of the “growth
fetish” in current capitalism.’
Steven Poole, The Guardian

‘This is a genuinely important book by one of Britain’s most eminent environ-

mentalists who is also both a realist and, cautiously, an optimist. On our present
course, Porritt argues that we are heading towards global catastrophe, but that
there is a way of escape. In a challenging but carefully reasoned analysis, he charts
a way forward that promises sustainable prosperity within the framework of
the global market economy. It is an urgent “must-read” for policy-makers and
business leaders who have the power and influence to determine whether we all
sink or swim.’
Jonathan Dimbleby, political commentator and broadcaster
‘Trade in those lightweight summertime paperbacks for something with a bit
more bite. Jonathon Porritt looks at how capitalism could create a future where
wealth and ecological integrity aren’t mutually exclusive.’
Book of the Week, Scotland on Sunday

‘As the distillation of unparalleled experience on the frontline and formidable

reading, it is the best account of where we are now and how we might move
ahead. Porritt’s book is a brave and important working draft for an essential
positive alternative.’
Simon Caulkin, The Observer

‘Too many environmentalists see capitalism as the enemy. Porritt grapples with
its reality – a system capable of delivering sustainability and enhancing wellbeing,
but only if we think carefully about what form of capitalism we want. This book
stimulates that thinking.’
Adair Turner, Chair of the Economic and Social Research Council

‘This book is excellent, readable, comprehensive and ultimately quite optimistic.

Essential reading for anyone interested in the world, the environment, humanity
or the future.’
Warmer Bulletin

‘All too often, NGOs have to campaign against commercial activities that cause
environmental degradation around the world. Our message about unsustainable
lifestyles is increasingly understood, but greater thought leadership among business
and governments is needed. In this refreshing observation of capitalism, Porritt
positions the opportunities provided by sustainable development brilliantly.’
Robert Napier, former Chief Executive, WWF-UK

‘As ex-chair of the Green Party, one-time director of Friends of the Earth, and co-
founder and Director of Forum for the Future, Porritt is possibly the best person
to write a book such as this. The reader can feel confident that his views are based
on a desire to create a sustainable future rather than less laudable reasons . . . an
important factor when dealing with such a revolutionary book.’
Pauline Thomas, The Waste Paper

‘This is a very thoughtful and timely book. Many of those working towards a
more sustainable future for our planet see capitalism as a big part of the problem.
And with good reason. But if capitalism and free markets cannot be bent towards
sustainability – towards being part of the solution – then I believe there is no
solution. Hence the importance of this book. Read it.’
Lord May, President, The Royal Society
‘A message that businesses may find they are surprised to agree with.’
Financial Times

‘This book may well challenge any Christian environmentalists that see capitalism
as the enemy.’
Methodist Recorder

‘Here’s a compelling book that should sound the trumpet for a whole new
generation of engaged and optimistic young people, establishing once and for all
that we still have choices – we don’t have to sleepwalk our way into the future.’
David Puttnam, film producer and politician

‘In this brilliant and timely book Porritt has thrown down the gauntlet and
provided the necessary data and analysis on our collective dilemma.’
David Lorimer, Scientific and Medical Network Review

‘Porritt has applied a decade of experience with business and government

to address the dilemma that, while capitalism is the most effective system for
satisfying human needs, that process is putting intolerable strains on our ecology
and climate. The book is a lively and penetrating discussion of how we can build
on growing business interest in the challenges and opportunities.’
Mark Moody-Stuart, Chairman, Anglo American plc

‘a significant contribution to sustainable development literature and it deserves

the attention of business and political leaders on both sides of the Atlantic.’
Inspire (e-magazine of The European Bahá’í Business Forum)

‘Capitalism, like the Tin Man on the Yellow Brick Road, needs to prove it has a
heart. Jonathon Porritt, like the Wizard of Oz, is doing his best to help!’
Tim Smit, Chief Executive, The Eden Project
 Capitalism
as if the World Matters
 Capitalism
as if the World Matters

Jonathon Porritt

EAR T H SCAN
London • Sterling, VA
Revised paperback edition first published by Earthscan in the UK and USA in 2007

Hardback edition first published in 2005

Copyright © Jonathon Porritt, 2007

All rights reserved

ISBN: 978-1-84407-193-7

Typesetting by JS Typesetting Ltd, Porthcawl, Mid Glamorgan

Printed and bound in the UK by Cromwell Press, Trowbridge
Cover design by Susanne Harris

For a full list of publications please contact:

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Earthscan publishes in association with the International Institute for

Environment and Development

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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has been applied for

The paper used for the text pages of this book is

FSC certified. FSC (the Forest Stewardship Council)
is an international network to promote responsible
management of the world’s forests.
for ELEANOR and REBECCA

and for a generation

that depends so much
on our generation
coming to its senses
 Contents

Foreword by Amory B. Lovins xv

Acknowledgements xvii
Introduction xix

PART I – OUR UNSUSTAINABLE WORLD

1 Conflicting Imperatives 3
Introduction 3
The assault on nature 3
Economic prosperity 9
Our changing climate 12
Breakdown: breakthrough or collapse? 22
A glimpse into a sustainable future 29

2 Sustainable Development for Real 33

Introduction 33
Disentangling the definitions 33
Framing sustainable development 38
Culture wars in the US 43
The challenge to environmentalism 49

3 Re-engaging with Economic Growth 54

Introduction 54
The limits to growth 54
Raising the happiness stakes 60
The end of cheap oil 72
The peak oil/climate change interface 75

4 Unsustainable Capitalism? 86
Introduction 86
Capitalism and sustainability 86
Scale 98
Wants and needs 99
Competition 102
xii CAPITALISM AS IF THE WORLD MATTERS

Inequality 104
Inherent unsustainability? 107

5 Through the Global Looking Glass 111

Introduction 111
Democracy and globalization 111
Confronting the Washington Consensus 114
Confronting the multinationals 118
Confronting population growth 125
Taking stock 132

PART II – A FRAMEWORK FOR SUSTAINABLE CAPITALISM

6 The Five Capitals Framework 137
Introduction 137
Grappling with the concept of capital 137
The challenge of China 142

7 Natural Capital 148

Introduction 148
Defining natural capital 148
Natural added value 149
Valuing natural capital 155

8 Human Capital 163

Introduction 163
Defining human capital 163
Valuing human capital 170

9 Social Capital 174

Introduction 174
Defining social capital 174
Building social capital 177

10 Manufactured Capital 183

Introduction 183
Defining manufactured capital 183
Renewable energy 186
Aligning natural and manufactured capital 191

11 Financial Capital 197

Introduction 197
 CONTENTS xiii

Defining financial capital 197

Governance failures 199
The business case 202
Bringing financial capital down to Earth 206

PART III – BETTER LIVES IN A BETTER WORLD

12 Confronting Denial 213
Introduction 213
The capacity for denial 213
Nature denied 215
Justice denied 220
Closer to home 227
Security denied 229
Science denied 237
Are environmentalists in denial too? 242

13 Changing the Metrics 248

Introduction 248
Gross Domestic Product 248
Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare 251
And what about wellbeing? 252
Price signals and tax reform 255
The metrics of climate change 259

14 Business Excellence 264

Introduction 264
Reviewing the business case 264
The seductive illusion of CSR 270
Extending the licence to operate 275
Engaging with the base of the pyramid 281
Towards a more balanced scorecard 287

15 Civil Society 293

Introduction 293
Consumers and citizens 293
Sustainable consumption 298
Addressing the governance gap 304

16 Visions and Values 309

Introduction 309
Defining the universal dream 309
xiv CAPITALISM AS IF THE WORLD MATTERS

Sustainability values 314

Confronting the sceptics 319
Raising our spirits 322

17 Converging Imperatives 327

Introduction 327
Programmed for sustainability? 327
Education for sustainable development 332
Making sustainable development desirable 335
The high price of materialism 339
The politics of interdependence 343

Index 349
 Foreword

When my friend Jonathon Porritt asked me to introduce this British book to a

largely American audience, I hoped it might build on the foundation of Hawken
et al’s Natural Capitalism (1999). There we laid out a new way of doing business by
applying the essence of orthodox capitalism – productive use of and reinvestment
in capital – not just to two forms of capital, money and goods, but also to two
even more vital ones: people and nature.
Jonathon’s important book has not just built on but expanded that foundation,
synthesizing how to value and revitalize not just four but five or even six kinds
of capital (adding social and perhaps spiritual capital to our oversimplified list).
Its masterly overview of sustainability, its trenchant critique of environmental
politics and its skewering of pathological materialism are all solidly rooted in the
moral philosophy of the much-misrepresented Adam Smith.
The book’s structure is powerful, its logic clear, its language graceful and
its political perspective unapologetic. As well as penetrating insights into their
own country, American readers will find here a wealth of valuable British and
Continental thought and action that’s too little known here.
This book’s policy prescriptions reflect the widespread European view that
a sound policy framework is indispensable to leading and supporting business.
Federal gridlock may rather incline US readers to the view that while government
should steer, not row, it usually lags far behind the enormously more dynamic
private sector. Working mainly with large firms, co-evolving with civil society, I
see extremely fast, accelerating, powerful and exciting shifts, led by business for
profit – especially when policy focuses less on proper pricing (helpful though that
is) than on ‘barrier-busting’ so people can respond to price.
Seeking a level of integration rarely attempted, the book’s ambitious scope
necessarily sacrifices detail for breadth. The challenges posed often do have
specific solutions described elsewhere. For example, my own work Winning the Oil
Endgame (www.oilendgame.com) didn’t just claim a solution to the oil problem
is valuable and possible, but presented a detailed roadmap for eliminating US
oil use by the 2040s. That strategy is now well along in quiet implementation
through innovative technologies and competitive strategies; its business logic is
proving too compelling to need new national laws, taxes, subsidies or mandates.
This makes the peak oil argument irrelevant: nobody can know if it’s true, but it
doesn’t matter, because we should get off oil anyhow, at a cost of one quarter of
its current price, just to make money. Similarly, as every practitioner proves daily,
xvi CAPITALISM AS IF THE WORLD MATTERS

climate protection is not costly but profitable, because energy efficiency costs less
than the fuel it saves; governments will be the last to know.
Natural Capitalism’s analysis of how to wring many times more work from
each unit of energy and resources is described by Jonathon as ‘hugely optimistic’,
and the realistic potential is said barely to outpace economic growth. This merits
the gentle rebuke that Natural Capitalism’s findings are actually proving very
conservative. Our recent redesigns of $30 billion worth of facilities in 29 sectors,
for example, have consistently found a practical potential for 30–60 per cent
energy savings with 2–3-year paybacks in existing facilities, and for 40–90 per
cent savings in new ones with nearly always lower capital cost. And attentive firms
are very profitably cutting their energy intensity by 6–8 per cent per year – several
times faster than is needed to stabilize the climate.
Since 1975, even the wasteful US has cut its primary energy consumption
per dollar of real GDP by 48 per cent, oil by 54 per cent, directly used natural gas
by 64 per cent and water use by slightly more. Yet this just scratches the surface
of what’s now practical and worthwhile; those savings keep getting ever bigger
and cheaper as technologies and design integration improve faster than we apply
them.
I therefore feel that efficiency’s role in meeting the formidable challenges this
book describes has been understated. But that’s an empirical question. In a few
decades, we’ll know whether it was efficiency or other factors – mindful markets,
enlightened policies, the grassroots revolution described in Paul Hawken’s new
book Blessed Unrest, a spiritual revival, or others – that ultimately proved decisive.
And of course efficiency, though the cheapest, fastest and biggest part of the
integrative solution, is only a master key, not the whole toolkit: it can’t substitute
for many other and complementary methods, any more than technology by itself
can triumph without sound policy.
However we get there, Jonathon Porritt has done us all a service by synthesizing
a compelling vision of the goals we must steer towards, the main stages of the
journey, and how each of us can joyfully bend to our oar. The breadth and
incisiveness of his vision oblige us to be grateful, attentive and engaged.
The world does matter. It’s all we have. Smarter capitalism can be our most
effective tool in making it work, for all, for ever.

Amory B. Lovins
Chairman and Chief Scientist
Rocky Mountain Institute
Snowmass, Colorado
May 2007
 Acknowledgements

This book started out as a collaborative enterprise involving a large number of

colleagues at Forum for the Future. Having worked hard since our inception
in 1996 to operationalize the concept of an economic framework based on five
different kinds of capital (natural, human, social, manufactured and financial)
through our various partnership schemes, we subsequently felt the need to develop
some of the intellectual foundations behind that Framework – a rare example,
perhaps, of theory following practice!
That work was done during 2002 and 2003, and particular thanks are due to
James Wilsdon for his work on social capital, to Rupert Howes and Brian Pearce
for their work on financial capital, to David Bent and David Aeron-Thomas for
their work on environmental cost accounting, to Mark Everard and David Cook
for their work on manufactured capital, to Martin Wright for his work on security
issues and sustainability, and to Peter Price-Thomas and Simon Slater for their
work on spiritual capital.
But the real origins of the work go back to discussions between myself and
Paul Ekins in the mid-1990s when we were drawing up plans for the organization
that would eventually become Forum for the Future. Paul had already done
substantial work on the whole question of economic growth and sustainability,
and the degree to which the two could be reconciled within a capitalist economy.
The idea of using the five different kinds of capital to demonstrate what a
genuinely sustainable economy would look like in practice emerged from those
discussions, and an internal Forum paper written by Paul in 1997 became the
source document for a lot of the work that the Forum has done in this area since
then.
I should add that Paul’s own book, Economic Growth and Environmental
Sustainability, has done more to help me get my head around these issues than
any other single work.
And there have been many other works over the last couple of years as what
started out as a quite self-contained presentation of the Forum’s Five Capitals
Framework broadened out into an exploration of many other aspects of the
economics and politics of sustainability. This book could not have been written
without that intellectual feast having been available to me, and I have drawn on it
unhesitatingly to lend substance and coherence to my own exploratory journey.
Where I hope I’ve been able to add something a little different is in the
synthesizing of all those different inputs. It is only fair to say, in that context, that
xviii CAPITALISM AS IF THE WORLD MATTERS

for all the guidance I’ve drawn on from colleagues both within and beyond the
Forum, Capitalism as if the World Matters is an expression of my own personal
views rather than those of Forum for the Future as an organization. It’s there that
responsibility must lie for any misinterpretations or analytical inadequacies.

FORUM FOR THE FUTURE

Forum for the Future is the UK’s leading sustainable development charity.
Its mission is to accelerate the change to a sustainable way of life, taking a
positive, solutions-oriented approach in everything it does. That mission
is shared with partners drawn from business, finance, local authorities,
regional bodies and higher education. We communicate what we learn with
our partners to a wide network of decision-makers and opinion-formers.

www.forumforthefuture.org.uk

info@forumforthefuture.org.uk

All royalties from the sales of Capitalism as if the World Matters are being paid to
Forum for the Future to support its ongoing work.
 Introduction

The old world is ending, and the new, hesitantly, is emerging. It’s a painful process,
and it’s going to get a lot more painful before it starts getting better. This is not
good news for those who believe that the threats to today’s dominant model of
progress can still be resolved with a few minor economic tweaks and political fixes.
But it is good news for all those who know that we could be doing something so
much more effective in terms of fashioning better lives for the vast majority of
people all around the world.
To some, such assertions will sound simply preposterous, given that we’ve
been enjoying the fruits of the triumph of capitalism over communism for little
more than twenty years. And the idea of there being some kind of successor to
capitalism waiting in the wings is quite understandably dismissed out of hand. But
as a citizen of Europe, there’s one historical parallel I can’t get out of my head. On
11th November 1918, the triumphant allies signed the Armistice with a crushed
and humiliated Germany. On 1st September 1939, Hitler invaded Poland, and
the world was cast once more into devastating war. The analogy may be somewhat
stretching, but twenty years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, a triumphalist
axis of capitalist nations has so profoundly mismanaged and abused its triumph
that something much, much worse than the Cold War it brought an end to now
looms in our midst.
Hearing that, you may wish to read no further! But this is not just another
eco-tract predicting the end of everything we hold dear, if not the end of life on
Earth itself. After 35 years banging on about the need for radical change, I’m more
optimistic now than I’ve ever been. There’s so much to be hugely hopeful about
– technologically, politically, spiritually.
To justify such improbable optimism, I’ve had to go way back beyond the
symptoms of today’s disordered world to investigate the root causes of that
disorder, and to remind people that capitalism has always been a self-correcting
system, capable of startling and seemingly ‘unthinkable’ shifts at precisely the
moment when those shifts are most needed. This investigation has led me to the
conclusion that it is indeed still possible for capitalism today to self-correct (or,
more accurately, to be corrected) before traumatic collapse.
For all who believe, as I do, that market-based, properly regulated capitalism
is still capable of meeting today’s daunting challenges, that’s our best hope. But
this is no easy path. Anything vaguely resembling ‘business-as-usual’ is no less
than a death warrant for the highest ideals of contemporary civilization. And that
xx CAPITALISM AS IF THE WORLD MATTERS

means we have to dig down a lot deeper than today’s superficial, febrile political
debates seem inclined to do. Václav Havel, former President of Czechoslovakia
and one of the wisest commentators on the lessons to be learned from the collapse
of communism, has tirelessly pointed out that ‘without a global revolution in the
sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better’.
And we will indeed need to engineer tomorrow’s world, step by step, with
great determination. It won’t just happen by chance. The world we live in today
is not unplanned; it’s the way it is because that’s the way earlier political elites
wanted it to be. Track back to those extraordinary years after the Second World
War where massive entrepreneurial energy was unleashed, particularly in the
United States and Europe. In good faith, without so much as an inkling of today’s
‘sustainability crunch’, the goal was to liberate people the world over (and not just in
the rich world) through increased consumption. This 1948 quote from Victor Lebow,
one of the most creative retail analysts of that post-war era, will shock people today but
was seen then as both visionary and progressive:

Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consump-

tion our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into
rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in
consumption. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced
and discarded at an ever-increasing rate.’

Sixty years on, this process of ‘manufacturing desire’ has proved to be massively
successful. But two ‘unintended consequences’ now imperil everything we may
aspire to in the future. First, politicians and wealth creators have so successfully
risen to Lebow’s challenge that the biological foundations of our human civilization
are now at risk. Second, that success has enriched so minute a percentage of
humankind that even if the world wasn’t about to implode physically, it certainly
is economically, even in the world’s richest countries. For instance, the top 10 per
cent of Americans today own 70 per cent of net US wealth, and the top 5 per
cent more than everyone else put together. The average CEO in the US today
earns in one day what an average worker earns in a year. This is America we’re
talking about, the nation that has made a bigger difference to the world’s ‘poor
and needy’, and offered more hope to the world’s disenfranchized, than any other
country on Earth. Tragically, however, the US today, at this dreadful moment in
its eventful history, represents the biggest threat to everything the US once stood
for.
Today’s lethal cocktail of environmental, social and security issues poses an
unprecedented challenge to world leaders. But I’m always slightly startled by the
number of my colleagues, in both the US and Europe, who believe it’s already
too late to pull things back from the brink even if we wanted to. I shall examine
the pros and cons of that case, particularly as it relates to climate change, in
much more detail at different points in the book. However, in terms of what we
 INTRODUCTION xxi

would need to do to restore the Earth’s basic life-support systems (soils, forests,
fresh water, grazing land, biodiversity, fisheries, etc.), this is in fact much more
manageable than most people realize, with an asking price that is probably no
more than US$100 billion, according to Lester Brown, President of the Earth
Policy Institute in Washington.
Does that sound too much? Astonishingly reasonable? What’s your benchmark?
Perhaps it would help to know that $100 billion is less than 10 per cent of the
$1.6 trillion that is reckoned to end up every year in offshore tax havens, beyond
the reach of any government, as a result of capital flight, widespread and often
endemic corruption, and tax avoidance of every conceivable description (mostly
legal). Our world is in fact rich beyond most people’s wildest imagination, yet only
the tiniest imaginable percentage of that wealth plays any part at all in securing a
decent, dignified, sustainable life for the majority of people today.
Capitalism has always had its contradictions, but tax avoidance and ‘off-
shoring’ on this scale warps the very foundations of market capitalism. When
people like George Soros and even Zbigniew Brzezinski (a redoubtable neo-
conservative who helped shape US foreign policy throughout the 1970s and 80s)
begin to warn of a potential implosion in the system as a consequence of today’s
‘global political awakening around social injustice’, then it’s probably time to sit
up and listen.
There’s an interesting correlation here between climate change and poverty.
Many scientists today are focused on the possibility of what is called ‘non-linear
climate change’, where the gradual build-up of manmade greenhouse gases in the
atmosphere leads not to a gradual increase in average temperatures, followed by a
gradual increase in the severity of climate-related events, but rather to a dramatic
(‘non-linear’) step-change in the climate. This hypothesis is underpinned by
findings from ice cores in both the Arctic and the Antarctic which show earlier
sea level rises of several metres in a single century. About 14,000 years ago, for
example, sea levels rose approximately 20 metres over the course of 400 years, or
about 1 metre every 20 years.
Far fewer people look to the possibility of ‘non-linear social change’ as a con-
sequence of the very deep-seated, and still gradually worsening, levels of inequity
in society. We’ll see later that research today shows that nearly 60 per cent of people
live in countries where the gap between rich and poor is still getting bigger, not
narrowing. As with climate change, the effects of this are often indirect, diffuse,
long-term; there’s always something more pressing for politicians to deal with,
and NIMTO (Not In My Term of Office) mindsets tend to prevail. But we’ve see
many examples of ‘non-linear social change’ in the past, most recently with the
collapse of communism and the Iron Curtain in central Europe in the 1980s, over
a remarkably short period of time. So just how unequal will things need to get
before political instabilities and other knock-on consequences bring about further
non-linear change?
xxii CAPITALISM AS IF THE WORLD MATTERS

For the best part of ten years, I have been fortunate enough to end up working
with a large number of people at senior level in both government and business
– through Forum for the Future, the UK Sustainable Development Commission
and the Prince of Wales’s Business and the Environment Programme – who are
increasingly open to seeking answers to those difficult questions. Although it is, of
course, possible that the wool is being pulled over my eyes by all of these people all
of the time, my overwhelming impression is that more and more of them are now
intent upon seriously pushing forward with more sustainable ways of doing their
jobs. These are not radical people. They are not activists. They would not dream
of looking for change outside the system: if it can’t be made to happen inside the
system, then for them it just won’t work. Given the urgency now required, both
the length of time it takes to get the basics sorted and the extraordinary reluctance
to take any real risks remain hugely frustrating – but it is still the case that almost
all key policy processes continue to move slowly in the right direction.
And that, of course, means that the emerging solutions have to be fashioned
within the embrace of capitalism. Like it or not (and the vast majority of people
do), capitalism is now the only economic show in town. The drive to extend the
reach of markets into every aspect of every economy is an irresistible force, and
the benefits of today’s globalization process are still held by a substantial majority
of people to outweigh the costs – however serious those costs may be, as we shall
see. The adaptability and inherent strengths of market-based, for-profit economic
systems have proved themselves time after time, and there will be few reading this
book who are not the direct beneficiaries of those systems.
It’s as well to acknowledge both the power and the enduring appeal of
capitalism up front. Much of what follows will seek to harness the strengths
of that system to the pursuit of sustainable development, while simultaneously
challenging our dependence upon today’s particular model of capitalism. For fear
of arriving at a different conclusion, there is a widespread though largely unspoken
assumption that there need be no fundamental contradiction between sustainable
development and capitalism. That assumption will be rigorously tested in Part I,
as will the relationship between most governments’ good intentions on sustainable
development and the prevailing political and economic framework through which
they seek to deliver on those good intentions.
Sustainable development is still a relatively young and unfinished concept,
and has had to establish itself over the last 20 years or so at precisely the time
when those political philosophies which would have given it more space (social
democracy and democratic socialism) have surrendered the field to today’s
dominant, neo-liberal free market ideology. Organizations and individuals
championing sustainable development as a radically different model of progress
for humankind have had their work cut out simply trying to mitigate the worst
externalities of today’s global economy. There has been little time or opportunity
to map out more positive visions of what a sustainable world would look like,
to stop hammering on and on about the necessity of change and start focusing
 INTRODUCTION xxiii

instead upon the desirability of change in terms of improved quality of life, greater
security, and more fulfilled ways of working and living. We are so preoccupied
with avoiding nightmares in the future that we have pretty much given up on
offering our dreams of a better world today.
Capitalism as if the World Matters sets out to address that imbalance. It does so
on the basis of a new political convergence that I believe is beginning to emerge
around the twin concepts of sustainability and wellbeing. Governments around the
world are now struggling to reconcile the legitimate material aspirations of their
citizens with the need to protect the natural environment far more effectively than
we have been able to do until now. They would, of course, prefer it if there were
no such environmental constraints; but the costs of mismanaging our natural
capital are now so great as to demand a new and lasting resolution to this long-
running dilemma.
At the same time, though even less purposefully, governments are beginning
to wake up to the problems of trying to achieve everything via the medium of
constant economic growth. As we’ll see in Chapter 3, growth clearly provides
the wherewithal for delivering many of the improvements that people ask of
their governments (better public services, security, renewed infrastructure and so
on), as well as many of the material benefits that people seek through increased
personal wealth and consumption. But it also gives rise to substantial social and
environmental costs, and does not appear to be making people any happier or any
more contented with their lot in life. So should governments be shifting the focus
more towards the promotion of wellbeing and contentment, rather than towards
economic growth per se?
The problem is that economies are now so geared towards year-on-year
increases in personal consumption (partly in order to keep business growth
buoyant and tax revenues flowing) that politicians are extremely reluctant even to
question this particular paradigm of progress. At the same time, companies have
been equally hostile to the notion that people might actually be better off by con-
suming less, and see any such discourse as a direct attack on the self-evident benefits
of free market economics. For many business people over the last fifteen years, this
has positioned sustainable development in the wrong psychological boxes – the
ones labelled ‘regulation and red tape’, ‘constraint on business’, ‘increased costs’
or ‘high risks’. Only during the last few years have we seen the other boxes –
labelled ‘opportunity’, ‘innovation’, ‘increased market share’ and ‘stronger brands’
– opening up in such a way as to provide wealth creators with an entirely different
and far more positive proposition. Given the dominant role of business in the
world today, this particular mindset transition is critically important: however
necessary or desirable something may be, it is unlikely to obtain the necessary
traction in today’s world unless the business community can be persuaded and
inspired to get behind it.
Opportunity is, thus, the third key element in the case made for a rapid transi-
tion to a very different variant of capitalism: capitalism as if the world matters.
xxiv CAPITALISM AS IF THE WORLD MATTERS

The politics of sustainability makes change necessary: we literally don’t have any
choice unless we want to see the natural world collapse around us, and with it our
dreams of a better world for humankind. The politics of wellbeing makes change
desirable: we really do have a choice in finding better ways of improving people’s
lives than those we are currently relying upon. And responding to both those
challenges will generate extraordinary opportunities for the wealth creators of the
future. When something is both necessary and desirable, and can be pitched to
demanding electorates in terms of both opportunity and progress, then it becomes
politically viable – and that’s the threshold that I believe we have now, at long last,
reached.
 PART I

OUR UNSUSTAINABLE WORLD

 1

Conflicting Imperatives

INTRODUCTION
Wouldn’t it be great if any book dealing with sustainability could open with a
resolutely upbeat account of the state of the planet? But that’s just not possible
– not in this decade, at least. As this chapter confirms, things are going from bad
to worse, and they’ll get worse yet. Despite a growing number of countervailing
success stories, almost all of the trends are still heading in the wrong direction.
There is no mystery here: burgeoning human numbers, a spectacularly
vibrant, consumption-driven economy, and a continuing inability to accept that
there really are natural limits, make for a lethal combination. But no politician
can currently gainsay that drive for increased prosperity – offering people more (at
almost any cost) – has become the number one political imperative. The resulting
impasse poses the greatest challenge we face today: we know that change is
necessary, but that doesn’t necessarily make it desirable. Nevertheless, this chapter
ends with a brief and optimistic account of what it would be like to live in a more
sustainable world, just to show how close that already is to most people’s idea of
a better life.

THE ASSAULT ON NATURE

At the start of the 21st century, our lives are bounded by two very different
and potentially irreconcilable imperatives. The first is a biological imperative: to
learn to live sustainably on this planet. This is an absolute imperative in that it
is determined by the laws of nature and, hence, is non-negotiable – this side of
extinction, it permits no choice. The second is a political imperative: to aspire to
improve our material standard of living year on year. This is a relative imperative in
that it is politically determined, with a number of alternative economic paradigms
available to us. These imperatives are therefore very different in both kind and
degree.
The need to find some reconciliation between these imperatives has never
been more urgent. The world has been completely transformed over the last 60
4 CAPITALISM AS IF THE WORLD MATTERS

years, with a combination of rapid population growth and massively increased

economic activity (driven by access to relatively cheap sources of coal, oil and gas)
exacting a harsh and continuing toll on the physical environment.
It has become fashionable in some quarters to disparage this kind of sweeping
assertion. Predominantly right-wing media in the US and the UK have taken to
their hearts a succession of dissenting scientists and commentators anxious to
reassure people that the environmental and social problems we face today are not
nearly as serious as environmental activists and poverty campaigners make out.
Accusations of exaggeration and scaremongering abound. Given that environ-
mentalists started talking in these apocalyptic terms back in the 1970s, how is it
that there has been no hint of any terminal breakdown during the last 30 years?
The understandable consequence of this barrage of complacency is that many
people really don’t know who to trust in terms of gauging just how serious things
are, especially on issues such as climate change (to which I will return at the end
of this chapter) where the ongoing controversies about both the science and the
politics are at their fiercest.
Yet, these days, most of the information about the state of the physical
environment (and, indeed, about the state of people living in the world’s poorest
countries) comes from government departments, the United Nations (UN) or
other international agencies, and independent academics. Non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) are rarely involved in commissioning original research, and
concentrate primarily upon disseminating and interpreting the data that comes
into the public domain from official sources. With the best will in the world, I find
it very difficult to explain how these official sources might have been subverted
to falsify information, peddle untruths or generally seek to play games with the
general public by exaggerating the seriousness of today’s environmental dilemmas.
For most environmentalists, this continuing denial on the part of ‘contrarians’
such as Bjorn Lomborg (2001) is but the last gasp of a 40-year endeavour to make
out that all is well with the world, even as our impact upon it grows exponentially
year on year.
It may be helpful to briefly review the official position on some of these
key environmental problems. In country after country, the data reveals a similar
state of affairs: we are continuing to destroy natural habitats of every kind
through conversion for human purposes. More than half of the world’s original
forest area has been lost and one third of what is left will be gone in the next 20
years at current rates of deforestation. A report from the Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO) in March 2007 (FAO, 2007) described the destruction of
forests in the developing world as being ‘out of control’. Africa lost more than
9 per cent of its trees between 1990 and 2005; the world as a whole lost another
3 per cent of its total forest area. An even larger proportion of original wetlands
has been destroyed, and more than one third of the world’s coral reefs are either
dead or severely damaged. Not surprisingly, this habitat destruction has had a
 CONFLICTING IMPERATIVES 5

huge impact upon wild species, with various estimates of loss of biodiversity from
the World Conservation Union (IUCN) and other international bodies a source
of intense concern. This situation has often been exacerbated by the impact of
alien species on many indigenous ecosystems, with billions of dollars now being
spent across the world on control and eradication programmes.
This litany of bio-devastation has been shouted out so often that it’s clear
politicians have simply switched off on hearing it. After the relative failure of
the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity, and the near silence that greeted
publication of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment report (MA; see below),
perhaps we should be rethinking our entire approach to biodiversity. In July
2006, leading biologists from around the world called for the creation of a new
international body for biodiversity to match the impact of the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – for whatever you may think about the IPCC’s
overall impact, it has compelled governments to take the advice of their scientific
institutions far more seriously than they would otherwise have done. And with
a ‘potentially catastrophic loss of species’ now unfolding in front of our eyes, the
IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (IPCC, 2007) couldn’t possibly have contained
worse news: up to 30 per cent of all plant and animal species are likely to be at
increased risk of extinction if global temperatures rise by more than 2°C.
In terms of managed (rather than wild) areas, we have seen little improvement
in management techniques over the last two decades. Soil erosion is a chronic
problem in many parts of the world, as is salinization, often caused by hugely
wasteful and poorly designed irrigation schemes. There are different estimates as
to the collective impact of all this upon farmland, but the UN FAO believes that
a minimum of 20 per cent of total cultivated acreage is now seriously damaged.
Overgrazing of grasslands has resulted in a similar loss of productivity in literally
dozens of countries.
More recently, there has also been growing concern about freshwater impacts,
both in terms of quantity (with severe water shortages now affecting a large number
of countries) and quality, as both rivers and groundwater aquifers are increasingly
affected by diffuse pollution of many different kinds. It is true that river quality
has often improved substantially in many Organisation for Economic Co-
operation and Development (OECD) countries during the last decade through
much tighter regulation and a growing reluctance to allow companies to use rivers
and streams as their private sewers. But the situation continues to worsen in most
developing countries. The same is true with local air quality.
When the will is there, it has occasionally proved possible to get on top of
major environmental problems. Quite rightly, the phasing out of gases such as
chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that were having such a damaging impact upon the
protective ozone layer in the upper atmosphere is seen as one of the most effective
examples of international diplomacy working to protect the environment and
people’s health. But even here, we’re not exactly out of the woods. There is a
6 CAPITALISM AS IF THE WORLD MATTERS

thriving black market in banned CFCs, and growing resistance in the US and
elsewhere to further measures to phase out other ozone-depleting substances such
as methyl bromide. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) still
reminds politicians that it is likely to be another 40 years before levels of ozone in
the atmosphere are restored to where they were during the 1980s.
One of the biggest problems in all of these areas is that the deterioration is
usually incremental, acre by acre, town by town, pollution incident by pollution
incident, species by species – and hence all but invisible to people living in the
midst of this progressive decline. The position in any one year may not be much
worse than in the preceding year, but go back 30 or 40 years and the changes are
stark. It is death by a thousand cuts, rather than by some traumatic shock to the
system which would be far harder for citizens and politicians to ignore.
Nowhere is this demonstrated more clearly than in the MA released in April
2005 (MA, 2005). This extraordinary study took four years to compile, involving
hundreds of scientists all over the world, assessing literally thousands of peer-
reviewed papers covering the principal aspects of the relationship between ourselves
and the natural world, and bringing those findings together in a single, extremely
powerful analysis. Its principal focus is on what are known as ‘ecosystem services’
– in other words, the benefits that we humans obtain from different ecosystems.
The MA describes ‘services’ in four categories: ‘provisioning services’, such
as food, water, timber and fibre; ‘regulating services’, which affect climate,
flood control, disease, waste and water quality; ‘cultural services’, which provide
recreational, aesthetic and spiritual benefits; and ‘supporting services’, such as
soil formation, photosynthesis and nutrient cycling. This serves to remind us,
however buffered against the impact of environmental damage we may think we
are through new technology, that we are still fundamentally dependent upon the
constant and reliable flow of ecosystem services to secure our own wellbeing.
The MA identifies the essential constituents of human wellbeing as having access
to the basic materials for a good life (such as food, shelter and clothing), sound
health, good social relations, security, and freedom of choice and action, and its
overall conclusions are deeply disconcerting:

• Over the past 50 years, humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and
extensively than in any comparable period of time in human history, primarily
in order to meet rapidly growing demands for food, freshwater, timber, fibre
and fuel. This has resulted in a substantial and largely irreversible loss in the
diversity of life on Earth.
• The changes that have been made to ecosystems have contributed to substantial
net gains in human wellbeing and economic development; but these gains
have been achieved at growing costs in the form of the degradation of many
ecosystem services.
• Approximately 60 per cent (15 out of 24) of the ecosystem services examined
are being degraded or used unsustainably, including freshwater, fisheries, air
 CONFLICTING IMPERATIVES 7

and water purification, and the regulation of regional and local climate, natural
hazards, and pests.
• The full costs of the loss and degradation of these ecosystem services are difficult
to measure, but the available evidence demonstrates that they are substantial
and growing.
• The harmful effects of this degradation are being borne disproportionately by
the poor, are contributing to growing inequities and disparities across groups
of people, and are sometimes the principal factor causing poverty and social
conflict.
• The degradation of ecosystem services is already a significant barrier to
achieving the Millennium Development Goals, and the harmful consequences
of this could grow significantly worse during the next 50 years.
• There is established but incomplete evidence that changes being made in
ecosystems are increasing the likelihood of non-linear changes in ecosystems
(including accelerating, abrupt and potentially irreversible changes) that have
important consequences for human wellbeing.

Blind optimism in the face of such a litany of continuing destruction and mis-
management is a strange phenomenon. It is premised on the hope that the
planet’s self-healing capacity remains resilient enough to weather these constant
assaults, despite growing evidence of irreversibility in terms of lost productivity
and diversity. There is something deeply unhistorical about this cornucopian
optimism, as if there wasn’t a robust body of evidence available to us – captured
authoritatively in Clive Ponting’s A Green History of the World (1991) and, more
recently, in Jared Diamond’s Collapse (2005) – demonstrating that there really are
‘points of no return’ when ecosystems are systematically overexploited and abused.
A rather more historical perspective would be helpful in all sorts of ways.
Over the last 550 million years, there have been five mass extinctions on planet
Earth, the last one just 65 million years ago when the dinosaurs disappeared.
For one reason or another (meteor or asteroid impact, dramatic climate change,
volcanic or other planetary traumas, or the normal process of speciation and
extinction as evolution unfolded), most life-forms that have appeared on planet
Earth have turned out to be unsustainable. We are the first species (as far as we
know) that is able to reflect upon where we have come from and where we are
headed. We are, therefore, able to conceptualize the necessary conditions for our
own survival as a species and, in the light of that understanding, so shape our
living patterns in order to optimize our survival chances.
It is only in the last few decades that our survival as a species has become an
issue. Slowly, painfully, we are coming to realize that there is nothing automatic
or guaranteed about our continued existence. If we don’t learn to live sustainably
within the natural systems and limits that provide the foundation for all life-
forms, then we will go the same way as every other life-form that failed to adapt
to those changing systems and limits. Deep down in our collective psyche, after
8 CAPITALISM AS IF THE WORLD MATTERS

hundreds of years of industrialization that systematically suppressed a proper

understanding of our continuing and total dependency upon the natural world,
that atavistic reality is beginning to resurface.
All else depends upon this. If we can’t secure our own biophysical survival,
then it is game over for every other noble aspiration or venal self-interest that
we may entertain. With great respect to those who assert the so-called ‘primacy’
of key social and economic goals (such as the elimination of poverty or the
attainment of universal human rights), it must be said loud and clear that these
are secondary goals: all else is conditional upon learning to live sustainably within
the Earth’s systems and limits. Not only is the pursuit of biophysical sustainability
non-negotiable; it’s preconditional.
Having said that, these are really two sides of the same coin. On the one
hand, social sustainability is entirely dependent upon ecological sustainability.
As we continue to undermine nature’s capacity to provide humans with essential
services (such as clean water, a stable climate and so on) and resources (such as
food and raw materials), both individuals and nation states will be subjected to
growing amounts of pressure. Conflict will grow, and threats to public health and
personal safety will increase in the face of ecological degradation.
On the other hand, ecological sustainability is entirely dependent upon social
sustainability. With a growing number of people living within social systems that
constrain their ability to meet their needs, it becomes increasingly difficult to
protect the natural environment. Forests are cleared to make way for land-hungry
farmers; grazing lands are overstocked, aquifers depleted, rivers over-fished; and
the rest of nature is driven back into ever smaller reserves or natural parks.
Fortunately, all species have a deep survival instinct. Ultimately, they do
everything they can to secure their own survival chances. And that is as true of
humans as it is of the Siberian tiger or the lowliest of bacteria. We humans have
now coined a name for our survival instinct: it’s called ‘sustainable development’,
which means, quite simply, living on this planet as if we intended to go on living
here forever.
With the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, it started to
dawn on people that in order to generate rising prosperity we have been literally
laying waste the planet, tearing down forests, damming rivers, polluting the air,
eroding topsoil, warming the atmosphere, depleting fish stocks, and covering
more and more land with concrete and tarmac. And as our numbers grow, by
an additional 75 million or so a year, the pressures on the planet and its life-
support systems (upon which all species depend, including ourselves) continue to
mount year by year. We can no longer go on ignoring the challenge of biophysical
sustainability.
 CONFLICTING IMPERATIVES 9

ECONOMIC PROSPERITY
Even as we witness this reality unfolding in front of our eyes, it seems that we
have no choice in the rich world but to seek to go on getting richer. On current
projections, the global economy will grow from around $60 trillion today to
around $240 trillion by 2050. Historians will reflect upon the fact that the current
model of progress, premised on year-on-year increases in material prosperity, can
only be traced back a couple of centuries; life without any expectation of increased
prosperity has, in fact, been the historical norm. And anthropologists might point
to the Kalahari Bushmen or other indigenous people as living proof that constant
improvements in our material standard of living are not a necessary condition of
human existence.
Environmentalists argue that the pursuit of increased prosperity is a second-
order political aspiration rather than a first-order imperative, and should in no way
be set alongside the pursuit of sustainability – a point to which we return later.
Exponents of the art of ‘voluntary simplicity’ (maximizing one’s quality of life
while minimizing one’s dependence upon a wasteful, energy-intensive standard
of living) point to the falsehood that increased prosperity automatically leads to
a higher quality of life. And adherents of the world’s leading religions are able to
call upon concepts such as ‘right livelihood’ or warnings about camels passing
through eyes of needles to demonstrate that God and Mammon still inhabit
different spheres.
That’s all well and good; but the vast majority of people alive today both want
to be better off themselves and want their children (if they have them) to be better
off than them. This would appear to be as true of citizens in the world’s richest
nations as of those in the poorest.
There are clearly enormous differences in different people’s material aspira-
tions, however. Although there is still serious poverty in almost all OECD
countries, what are defined as ‘basic human needs’ are now largely met in those
countries. But as far back as 1930, John Maynard Keynes pointed out that our
absolute wants (those which we feel regardless of our relative position in society)
are limited and finite; it is our relative wants (those which we feel in comparison to
what others have in society) that are apparently insatiable – and it is these relative
wants that keep the wheels of our growth machine spinning merrily away.
This is eloquently summarized in the United Nations Development Pro-
gramme’s (UNDP’s) Human Development Report, published in September 2005.
It describes progress as ‘depressingly slow’, despite some encouraging signs – an
extra 30 million children in school, child deaths cut by 3 million a year, overall life
expectancy up by two years, and so on. But more than 460 million people now
live in countries with a lower score on the Human Development Index (HDI) than
in 1990 – an ‘unprecedented reversal’, as the report puts it.
10 CAPITALISM AS IF THE WORLD MATTERS

In the midst of an increasingly prosperous global economy, 10.7 million

children every year do not live to see their fifth birthday, and more than
1 billion people survive in abject poverty on less than $1 a day. One
fifth of humanity live in countries where many people think nothing of
spending $2 a day on a cappuccino. Another fifth of humanity survive
on less than a dollar a day, and live in countries where children die for
want of a simple anti-mosquito bed net. (UNDP, 2005)

Reaffirming that ‘deep-rooted inequality is at the heart of the problem’, the report
pointedly comments that for every $1 spent on aid in rich countries, $10 is spent
on arms and military expenditure. Just the increase in defence spending since 2000,
if devoted to aid instead, would have been sufficient to reach the UN’s target of
0.7 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) being devoted to international
aid. It concludes: ‘this development disaster is as avoidable as it is predictable’.
In rich countries and poor countries alike, though with different justifications,
it is the pursuit of greater prosperity that drives the political process. Those
who claim that many people, deep down, know that increased prosperity won’t
necessarily make them happier may well be right. But that is not the way they
vote. Those who inveigh against today’s ‘ideological vacuum’ (where the pursuit
of economic growth has become an all too inadequate surrogate for real politics)
may do so with overwhelming justification. But such protestations would appear
to count for little across the political scene as a whole.
It was, after all, 35 years ago that two of the world’s most eminent economists,
William Nordhaus and James Tobin, published a landmark study criticizing the
use of Gross National Product (GNP) as the sole indicator of economic progress:
‘… maximization of GNP is not a proper policy objective. Economists all know
that, and yet their everyday use of GNP as the standard measure of economic
performance conveys the impression that they are evangelistic worshippers of
GNP.’ Yet mainstream economists have done next to nothing over those 35 years
to challenge the illegitimate ascendancy of GNP, with paralysing consequences for
policy-making at every level – as we will see in Chapter 3.
Francis Fukuyama was clearly a little premature when he asserted that the
demise of communism heralded ‘the end of history’. Nothing lasts forever, and
there’s little doubt that viable alternatives to capitalism (or, at least, a very different
model of capitalism) will emerge over time. The question is ‘when’ not ‘whether’,
and in which direction. In mapping out the kind of transformation that I believe
is now both necessary and desirable, I will be emphasizing the potential of a ‘soft
landing’ for contemporary capitalism, seizing hold of the wealth of opportunity
entailed in fashioning genuinely sustainable livelihoods for the 9 billion people
with whom we will be sharing this planet by the middle of the century.
Capitalism is a complex, adaptive system, and is clearly capable of profound
and rapid shifts. Even those who do not share my views have good reason to
be concerned about the durability of this particular model of capitalism. A
 CONFLICTING IMPERATIVES 11

combination of different factors – the deregulation of cross-border capital

flows; the emergence of currency trading on an unprecedented scale in today’s
‘casino economy’; increased liberalization exerting downward pressure on wages
and prices; growing disparities in wealth both within and between countries;
extraordinarily high levels of debt in so many countries and particularly in the
US; oil trading at around $70 dollars a barrel – makes the maintenance of our
current global economy look like an extremely dangerous high-wire act, with the
prospects of a vertiginous collapse ever more likely.
Indeed, many of today’s most trenchant critics of global capitalism believe that
the collapse of capitalism could be upon us far sooner than anyone anticipates,
often summoning up the analogy of the dramatic collapse of communism in a
manner and at a time that defied all of the prognostications of the world’s smartest
think-tanks and academics. And the collapse of global capitalism, it is often argued,
would usher in more self-reliant, compassionate and sustainable economies, with
none of today’s frenetic consumerism or aggressive self-interest.
Looking at the state of the world today, this seems an improbable scenario,
both in its assumption of a rapid rather than a long-term transition, and in
its assumption that such a transition would be benign. Whatever personal or
ideological sympathy one may feel for these alternatives, prevailing geopolitical
reality would seem to indicate a very different prospect – in which the process of
globalization accelerates still further, the phenomenon of mass denial continues
as the majority of people in the world today continue to press for improvements
in their material standard of living, and ‘reform from within’ remains the most
realistic of all of the political options available.
For anyone concerned about sustainability, such realpolitik is extraordinarily
challenging on two counts. First, the reconciliation (in part or in whole) of
these two imperatives (sustainability and increased prosperity) must therefore be
achieved through market-based systems in predominantly capitalist economies.
By implication, the more ‘market friendly’ any proposed reform may be, the
greater the likelihood of its adoption. Yet, as we will see, many of the changes
that are now required can only be twisted to fit these market disciplines with great
difficulty.
Second, it means that measures to achieve reconciliation must win widespread
political acceptance within the democratic systems that set the boundaries for those
economic markets. They cannot be imposed against the wishes of an electorate;
they must be agreed to be either necessary or desirable (and preferably both)
given the nature of the challenge we now face. What is more, the public policy
measures required to achieve that level of democratic ownership are unlikely to
come about through a simple return to the tried and tested precepts of ‘top–down’
social democracy. As Tom Bentley, former Director of the UK think-tank Demos,
says:
12 CAPITALISM AS IF THE WORLD MATTERS

The values of individualism, diversity and open exchange, which have

been fought for over centuries, have won out in the modern world. They
are embodied in the structure of capitalism, which now constitutes the
only viable possibility for organizing economies. This combination of
forces will not go away: the impulse to personal choice and freedom of
expression is more deep-rooted than any specific political project and has
a long way to run. It is aided and fuelled by the progress of consumer
capitalism, which systematically promotes the idea that the use of
individual purchasing power to make lifestyle choices creates fulfilment
since such choices are the key engine of capitalism’s growth and renewal.
(Bentley, 2002)

That puts the highest possible premium on political leadership in an age when
such leadership seems more and more elusive. As we will see in Chapter 3,
ecological reality is usually ignored if it is identified as any kind of serious barrier
to increased material prosperity. Nowhere has this been more evident than in
the response of the US to the phenomenon of climate change. Its basic rule of
thumb was definitively mapped out by George Bush senior when he arrived at the
1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, warning all and sundry that ‘the American
way of life’ was not up for grabs in the negotiations around the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The US did, eventually,
sign up to the Convention; but that was the last positive thing it has done on the
international climate change agenda since that time.

OUR CHANGING CLIMATE

Since the first edition of Capitalism as if the World Matters came out in 2005,
by far the most dramatic change has been the shift in global opinion on climate
change. Indeed, interest in and coverage of climate change is now so widespread
that some protagonists of sustainable development as an overarching framework
feel that this bigger picture is being eclipsed by an almost exclusive focus on
climate change. However, as proxies go, climate change is about as good as it gets
in terms of understanding the degree to which today’s dominant political and
business models are becoming less and less relevant in such a rapidly changing
world.
Until now, however, the politics of climate change has been a slow, frustrating
process. Serious concern first surfaced in the 1970s, slowly gathering momentum
through until the late 1980s, when the debate in the US really took off after three
years of extremely severe drought. That led directly to the original UNFCCC,
agreed at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and ratified in 1995 by 189
nations – including the US. Those nations all signed up to the goal of ‘stabilization
of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, at levels that would prevent
 CONFLICTING IMPERATIVES 13

dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system’. Since then, no

specific limit has been set, and the Americans spent the next ten years trying to
prevent the Kyoto Protocol (the first legally binding agreement emerging from the
UNFCCC) getting off the ground. Fortunately, they failed in this endeavour, and
the Protocol came into force on 16 February 2005.
The hard evidence that our climate is already changing as a consequence of
emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases had been getting
firmer and firmer during that time. Computer models of what might happen have
come increasingly in line with what is happening; even the US Administration
now accepts that the 0.6°C warming that has occurred since the middle of the
last century is, ‘in all probability’, the direct consequence of man-made emissions
– a huge step forward in terms of the US beginning to acknowledge the scale of
the problem.
All around the world, people are witnessing climate change for themselves
in terms of extreme weather events or natural phenomena ‘out of sync’ (for
instance, early flowering of trees and plants, or egg-laying in birds); and scientists
are tracking in enormous detail the shrinkage of glaciers, the thawing out of
the permafrost, the accelerated melting of ice sheets in both the Arctic and the
Antarctic, and the late freezing and earlier break-up of ice on rivers and lakes.
High Tide by Mark Lynas (2004) records the very personal accounts of the impact
of changing weather and seasons upon the lives of people in China, the Pacific,
Peru, Alaska and elsewhere. Behind the dry scientific data are the real-life stories
of people already devastated by a phenomenon too many of us still think of as one
of those problems for tomorrow, not today:

If there’s one message above all that I want people to take from these pages,
it’s this: that all the impacts described here are just the first whispers of
the hurricane of future climate change which is now bearing down on
us. Like the canary in the coal mine, those who live closest to the land
– the Eskimos in Alaska and the Pacific islanders – have been the first
to notice. But they won’t be alone for long. As I suspected when I first
began to undertake this mission, the first signs are evident to anyone
who chooses to look. (Lynas, 2004).

Courtesy of the IPCC, we now know a lot more about the scale of this ‘hurricane
of future climate change’. Its Fourth Assessment Report in February 2007 laid it
on the line for politicians still prevaricating in the face of residual uncertainty:

• CO2 levels at their highest for 650,000 years;

• Climate change ‘unequivocally’ happening;
• 90 per cent certain that it’s due to man-made emissions;
• 10–15 years to put in place serious measures to start reducing emissions of
CO2;
14 CAPITALISM AS IF THE WORLD MATTERS

• ‘Best guess’ indicates global temperature will rise by 1.8°C to 4°C by 2100;
• Worst case ‘indicates up to 6.4°C’;
• Policy responses geared to hold temperature increase below 2°C; and
• Urgent need to agree on global stabilization target for CO2 and other
greenhouse gases.

True enough, 90 per cent isn’t 100 per cent, and a small number of dissenting
scientists (many of them funded directly or indirectly by US corporations, and
by the oil industry in particular) continue to give the impression that the science
of climate change is still hotly contested and that no real consensus exists. When
the science historian Naomi Oreskes analysed the 928 peer-reviewed papers on
climate change published between 1993 and 2003, she came to the very different
conclusion that today’s consensus is almost universal: ‘politicians, economists,
journalists and others may have the impression of confusion, disagreement and
discord among climate scientists, but that impression is incorrect’ (Oreskes,
2004). In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore (2006) graphically captures the stark
disparity between what scientists have concluded and what media commentators
make of these conclusions:

Number of peer-reviewed articles dealing with climate change

published in scientific journals during the previous 10 years: 928
Percentage of articles in doubt as to the cause of global warming: 0%
Articles in the US popular press about global warming during
the previous 14 years: 636
Percentage of articles in doubt as to the cause of global warming: 53%

A particularly galling example of this hit the news both in the UK and the US
when a one-off documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle (Durkin, 2007),
paraded a line-up of dodgy scientists peddling one particular theory (that it’s
increased radiation from the sun that is causing the Earth to warm up, releasing
more greenhouse gases in the process) that has been demonstrated time after time
to be without any empirical basis whatsoever. The only serious scientist among
them, Professor Carl Wunsch, shamefacedly acknowledged that they ‘completely
misrepresented’ him, a trick well known to the writer and presenter of this
particular travesty, Martin Durkin, whose earlier environmental programmes
have involved such devious misrepresentations that Channel Four was forced to
issue grovelling public apologies.
Having been routed scientifically, most contrarians have now shifted their
argument to the economics of climate change: even if it is happening, and even if
it is going to have extremely severe impacts upon humankind in terms of rising
 CONFLICTING IMPERATIVES 15

sea levels, extreme weather events, disrupted agriculture and so on, the costs of
doing anything to mitigate these impacts are deemed by contrarians to be far too
onerous. Marshalled by Bjorn Lomborg in Europe, and by a host of right-wing
think-tanks in the US (such as the Cato Institute and the Competitive Enterprise
Institute), they are succeeding yet again in giving politicians a pretext for delay
and half-hearted half-measures.
Even this ‘final contrarian redoubt’ has now been smoked out by the report
from Sir Nicholas Stern, The Economics of Climate Change, published in November
2006. In describing climate change as ‘the greatest market failure the world has
ever seen’, this UK Treasury-funded report does for the economics of climate
change what the IPCC has done for the science. What Stern seeks to demonstrate
above all is ‘that there need be no irreconcilable clash between securing increased
economic prosperity and addressing the challenge of climate change’ (Stern,
2007). The report estimates the cost of action in addressing climate change at
around 1 per cent of global GDP every year; ‘business as usual’ will result in
economic damage of between 5 per cent and 20 per cent of global GDP every
year, and Stern comments that ‘the appropriate estimate is likely to be in the
upper part of this range’. In terms of getting one’s head around what this actually
means, he contrasts that level of damage with disruption on a scale similar to that
associated with the two world wars and the economic depression of the first half
of the 20th century.
Nonetheless, 1 per cent of GDP is not immaterial. In March 2007, the con-
sulting firm McKinsey published one of the first estimates of the costs entailed
in meeting the EU’s new target of a 20 per cent reduction in CO2 emissions
by 2020. This was assessed at up to €1.1 trillion (£747 billion). It showed that
simple technology (such as energy-saving light bulbs and wind power) will be
capable of providing up to 75 per cent of the required reductions in greenhouse
gas emissions, and that politicians should concentrate on implementing the most
cost-effective environmental measures first, rather than coal-fired power stations
with Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS).
No doubt further studies will emerge, both here in Europe and in the US,
providing alternative economic projections. But the reality is that things are
now moving, all around the world, and the politics of climate change have at
long last moved to the very centre of the political stage. It was interesting that
in setting the target of a 20 per cent cut in CO2 emissions (on 1990 levels) by
2020, the 2007 EU Summit also agreed that it would ratchet that up to 30 per
cent if other countries (particularly the US, China and India) follow suit. It also
determined that 20 per cent of Europe’s energy will be required to come from
renewable sources by 2020. Bizarrely, however, the category of renewables has
been expanded to include nuclear power (primarily to keep France on board),
although it’s blindingly obvious that the reserves of uranium on which nuclear
power depend are no more ‘renewable’ than reserves of oil or gas.
16 CAPITALISM AS IF THE WORLD MATTERS

For all that, different EU countries are bound to take different paths to the
same end. Sweden has set the highest ambition level in determining to make
itself ‘all but fossil-fuel free’ by 2020 – it currently relies on fossil fuels for around
35 per cent of its total energy consumption. Sweden’s ‘green gold’ (its huge and
well-managed forests) will fill a lot of that gap in terms of biomass and biofuels,
but every available technology will be expected to play its part. The UK may lack
Sweden’s forests, but it too has taken a very strong lead, setting CO2 reduction
targets in a legally-binding framework (at least 26 per cent by 2020 and 60 per
cent by 2050, with firm ‘milestones’ along the way), creating an independent
advisory committee to determine appropriate targets in the future, and building
in all sorts of ‘enabling powers’ to ensure that future governments do not have to
keep going back to Parliament with primary legislation every time they want to
bring in new measures.
Many critics believe that this is the turning point as far as the UK getting
its climate change act together in its own backyard is concerned. Hitherto, it has
been content to rely on the inspired international leadership of the former Prime
Minister Tony Blair, who undoubtedly did more than any other individual to
maintain at least some semblance of forward progress with other world leaders.
By bringing countries like India and China into the G8 process at the Gleneagles
Summit in 2005, he created space for the kind of persistent and less threatening
diplomacy that the formal UN-driven negotiations had failed to bring about.
Not that the US took advantage of that space. From the time they went
back on their campaign pledge, in 2001, to legislate to control emissions of CO2,
and then pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol shortly after that, President Bush and
Vice-President Cheney have remained sunk deep in their denial of the science of
climate change, aggressively defending the narrow interests of the US economy,
suppressing reports, corrupting advisory bodies and blocking even the most
modest of reforms. It is no exaggeration to say that these two figures (supported
by the likes of the notorious Senator Inhofe, who describes climate change as ‘the
greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people’) have come to represent
a quite unique ‘axis of evil’ regarding climate change. Americans often complain
about being ‘singled out’ for unfair calumny in the climate change ‘hall of shame’.
They shouldn’t – as Joseph Stiglitz explains through these astonishing statistics:

The US emits close to 25 per cent of all greenhouse gases. Wyoming,

the least populous state, with only 495,700 people, emits more carbon
dioxide than 74 developing countries with a combined population of
nearly 396 million. The CO2 emissions of Texas, with a population of
22 million, exceed the combined emissions of 120 developing countries
with an aggregate population of over 1.1 billion people. (Stiglitz,
2006)
 CONFLICTING IMPERATIVES 17

Fortunately for the rest of the world, President Bush and Vice-President Cheney
have been effectively sidelined since the mid-term elections in 2006. Winning
control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate has permitted the
Democrats to start undoing six years of neglect. Out went Senator Inhofe as Chair
of the most important Committee in the Senate, and in came Barbara Boxer, a
redoubtable climate change campaigner. Levels of activity on climate change in
both houses are second only to activity on the war in Iraq, with a number of
different proposals under consideration to introduce some kind of ‘cap-and-trade’
scheme for US industry.
In effect, Congress is simply catching up with the rest of America, which
selected a very different gear after Hurricane Katrina in October 2005. As
Governor of California, Arnie Schwarzenegger took the lead, with an extremely
ambitious climate change strategy including mandatory, economy-wide emission
reductions. Twenty-three states now have renewable electricity production
mandates, and almost as many have adopted greenhouse gas reduction targets,
or are in the process of developing their own climate action plans. The eight
states in the North East are on the point of introducing an innovative ‘cap-and-
trade’ scheme of their own, and the mayors of almost 400 cities are also on the
move in a manner that defies any conventional Republican/Democratic split.
Former Vice-President Al Gore has had a huge impact with his Oscar-winning
film, An Inconvenient Truth, allowing millions of American citizens to get their
heads around climate change for the very first time. This has to go down as one
of the most influential and effective environmental campaigns ever witnessed in
America – even Ralph Nader, who stood for the Green Party against Al Gore
in the 2002 Presidential election (and who is held by many to have deprived
Gore of the success that would otherwise have been his), is said to be a little bit
‘impressed’!
Predictably enough, public opinion in the US is also gradually shifting, despite
the fact that until recently mainstream American media had pretty much ignored
climate change. However, this is no seismic shift. Throughout 2005, high gas
prices were certainly a worry, but little connection was made between concerns
about energy security and concerns about climate change. The best efforts of
environmentalists to press alarm bells on climate change after Hurricane Katrina
(including rallies in more than 30 US cities) quickly faded away as media coverage
declined, especially as the 2006 hurricane season turned out to be as benign as
2005’s had been traumatic. The simple fact is that Americans remain strikingly
less concerned about climate change than their European counterparts: roughly
50 per cent of Americans don’t think it’s a problem, including 75 per cent of
Republicans, and only 40 per cent reckon it’s caused by man-made emissions
of CO2 and other greenhouse gases – all of which reinforces the natural caution
and conservatism that even the Democrats have shown on climate change until
now.
18 CAPITALISM AS IF THE WORLD MATTERS

Which makes it all the more encouraging that so many US companies have
clearly got the message, led by the likes of Jeff Immelt of General Electric, Lee
Scott of Wal-Mart, and Chad Holliday of DuPont, in effect dismissing the Bush
Administration’s position as scientifically corrupt and increasingly hostile to US
economic interests. In January 2007, a powerful consortium of CEOs (from
companies like BP, Alcoa, General Electric (GE), DuPont, Caterpillar, Lehman
Brothers and Duke Energy) joined forces with the World Resources Institute,
Environmental Defense and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC)
to call for mandatory reductions in greenhouse gases. The US Climate Action
Partnership is clear that voluntary measures will never be sufficient: ‘It must be
mandatory, so that there is no doubt about the actions required.’
President Bush has of course ignored this, just as he has ignored every other
intelligent, constructive proposal during his time in the White House. And he
has made it clear that he will veto any cap-and-trade proposals that the legislature
brings forward, notwithstanding the minor concession he made at the 2007 G8
Summit in Germany in agreeing to rejoin international discussions to come up
with a successor initiative to the Kyoto Protocol by the end of 2008. Such a veto
may not matter as much as it once would have, however. As serious campaigning
for the 2008 Presidential Election gets under way, it seems more than likely that,
whoever is eventually nominated, both parties will go into the election formally
supporting some kind of cap-and-trade scheme. And that commitment will have
a dramatic effect on the international debate, especially if it brings America back
into discussions about what needs to happen after the first Kyoto period comes to
an end in 2012. And that should, in turn, change the debate in countries like China
and India. The US Administration’s intransigence and clear contempt for the rest
of the world have allowed developing countries to sit firmly on the sidelines of the
Kyoto process. If the one nation that is responsible for more than 25 per cent of
global greenhouse emissions, and which clearly has a greater historical legacy than
any other, is refusing to make any moves to restrict emissions, one can understand
why negotiators for China and India have been adamant that they will not budge
until America (and the rest of the rich world) has set its own house in order.
But here too things may be changing. Having once declared that it would
accept no mandatory reductions in emissions of CO2 until its citizens have
reached an average per capita income of $5,000 – which will not happen for
many years, notwithstanding China’s dramatic economic growth – China’s leaders
are beginning to realize that this may not be so smart. Its principal energy-related
objective in the latest 5 Year Plan is to reduce energy intensity (the amount of
energy required for each unit of economic value) by 20 per cent by 2010. This
makes good economic sense, given how disastrously inefficient China is compared
with other countries. Such efficiency improvements would simultaneously allow
China to slow the growth in emissions of CO2 – though it has to be said that
China is still on track to overtake the US as the world’s largest emitter of CO2 by
2009.
 CONFLICTING IMPERATIVES 19

Chinese leaders have also realized that their economy is far more vulnerable
to accelerating climate change than most of the OECD countries that caused
the problem in the first place. Climate change is already exacerbating problems
associated with soil erosion and chronic desertification, and is likely to have a
terrible impact on already frighteningly scarce water supplies in key agricultural
regions of China. Sea level rises of much less than a metre would have a devastating
impact along the whole of the Eastern seaboard, where much of China’s economic
muscle is located. I shall return to this in more detail in Chapter 6.
This is precisely the picture that the second part of the IPCC’s Fourth
Assessment Report conjured up in March 2007. As Rajendra Pachauri, Chair of
the IPCC, put it: ‘The poorest of the poor in the world – and this includes poor
people in prosperous societies – are going to be the worst hit. People who are poor
are least able to adapt to climate change.’ The report says that climate change
will cause immediate and unavoidable harm, including less food from farming in
some areas (particularly in Africa), more violent storms, more drought and heat
waves, and the dwindling of water supplies as mountain glaciers melt.
It seems extraordinary, as one devastating report after another crashes down
on politicians’ desks, that we should simultaneously be witnessing the largest
ever wave of new investment in coal-fired power stations. Coal is the dirtiest
and most CO2 intensive of all the fossil fuels, and has profound impacts on the
environment both locally and globally. Yet in the US, after almost 30 years of no
new plants coming on line, there are now plans for as many as 150. Coal prices
are low and very stable (particularly in comparison to gas), demand is soaring, and
companies reckon that if there is to be a ‘cap-and-trade scheme’ they’d better get
their investment in first! This threat was significantly enhanced in March 2007
when the US Supreme Court made a landmark ruling that the Environmental
Protection Agency did indeed have the power to treat CO2 as a ‘pollutant’ –
something that the Agency had always claimed it was not authorized to do.
The picture in China is even worse, with one new coal-fired power station
coming on line every ten days. China is already the world’s largest coal producer,
with 26,000 coal mines employing around 8 million people, and coal accounts
for 75 per cent of total electricity generation. It also accounts for 90 per cent of
the 25 million tonnes of sulphur dioxide released in China every year, 70 per cent
of particulates, 67 per cent of nitrogen oxides and 70 per cent of the 4.7 billion
tonnes of CO2 emissions. Of the $63 billion of damage caused by environmental
pollution in 2004 (according to China’s State Environmental Protection Agency),
43 per cent is caused by the burning of coal. China has now set ambitious targets
for reducing emissions of sulphur dioxide, but it will have its work cut out
achieving them as demand for energy continues to soar.
Little wonder there is now so much interest in ways of capturing the CO2
from coal plants before it is released into the atmosphere, and then storing it
underground in depleted oil and gas reservoirs or saline aquifers. CCS is suddenly
very big business, with increasingly ambitious plans for prototype plants being
20 CAPITALISM AS IF THE WORLD MATTERS

brought forward in Japan, the US, the UK and elsewhere. Some scientists are very
bullish about the technical viability of CCS, claiming that all that is needed to
make it work is a proper price for every tonne of CO2 that is not released into the
atmosphere. Others are much more cautious, in both engineering and financial
terms, pointing to the very substantial costs involved not just in removing the
CO2 but in taking it from the power station or refinery to the place where it is
going to be buried. Al Gore has been particularly critical of CCS, and indeed of
all new ‘clean coal’ technologies: ‘It is time to recognize that the phrase “clean
coal technology” is devoid of meaning unless it means ‘zero carbon emissions’
technology.’
In this instance, I think Al Gore may be misled. A lot of coal in China, India,
the US and elsewhere is going to get burned over the next 20 years whether we
like it or not. I’m no great fan of technological ‘fixes’, but it seems to me that we
have no choice but to find a way of making CCS a success – and a huge success
at that. If we can’t store away some of the billions of tonnes of CO2 that will
otherwise be released into the atmosphere, then our chances of staying below that
2°C threshold for avoiding ‘dangerous climate change’ by the end of this century
(as reckoned by the IPPC) are zero.
Some scientists believe they are already zero – with or without CCS, or ‘clean
coal’, or huge new investments in solar power, wind power and other renewable
technologies, or even massive improvements in energy efficiency. Their view of
the IPPC is that it’s a hopelessly conservative body and that in having to reflect
the consensus among thousands of scientists with widely diverging views it fails
to give politicians the true picture. The 2007 Fourth Assessment Report, for
instance, contains very little reference to the concerns that many scientists now
have about accelerating feedback effects in the way certain natural systems are
responding to the warming that we have already caused to happen.
Over the last couple of years, attention has focused in particular on the
permafrost in Siberia (where current increases in average temperatures appear to
be melting the layer of permafrost under which is trapped billions of tonnes of
methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more powerful than CO2), or melting sea ice
in the Arctic (with less ice, more of the incoming solar radiation is absorbed by
the ocean rather than being reflected back into the atmosphere, causing further
warming), and on the rainforests of the Amazon starting to dry out, with the very
real possibility that over time they will become net emitters of CO2 rather than a
CO2 sink. And there is even evidence to suggest that more and more CO2 is being
released all over the world as average soil temperatures gently rise.
And that’s why more and more scientists are now talking not so much of
gradual shifts in the climate (more or less in line with the gradual increase in
concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere), but of abrupt, non-linear shifts from
one climate state to another. There’s plenty of evidence in the historical data
culled from ice cores in both the Arctic and Antarctic to demonstrate that this has
happened many times before. We just don’t know when those feedback loops may
 CONFLICTING IMPERATIVES 21

kick in, or even whether staying below a 2°C increase by the end of the century
really is sufficient to prevent ‘runaway’ and potentially irreversible climate shifts.
After all, a 2°C average rise means increases closer to 5°C or 6°C in the polar
regions. If you want to know what this kind of countdown to meltdown looks
like, Mark Lynas’s new book, Six Degrees (2007), spells it out as graphically as you
can imagine. To me, it’s amazing how unconcerned we still seem to be in the face
of this accumulating evidence, with the very real threat, as Jim Lovelock puts it, of
‘the world [being] on the brink of a vast and mostly unpleasant change that may
mark the end of our present civilization’ (Lovelock, 2006).
As the world goes about its ‘business as usual’ business, climate scientists are
wrestling with all of these massively complex variables and potentially devastating
consequence. It seems to me, however you interpret all this, that we really are
very close now to the ultimate tipping point of all: the point at which the human
species loses the ability to command its own destiny in the face of nature’s infinitely
mightier powers.
But how are we to deal with the psychological implications of all this? I’ve
heard Jim Lovelock speak on a couple of occasions, laying out the central thrust
of his Revenge of Gaia (2006) that it’s basically too late, and that even if we
renounced the use of all fossil fuels tomorrow, the level of man-made warming
we’ve already induced would still lead ineluctably to runaway climate change.
Sustainable development is therefore a complete fiction; ‘sustainable retreat’ is all
we have to look forward to.
Lovelock is one of my great heroes, despite his zealous and (in my opinion, at
least) irrational advocacy of nuclear power – if it really is too late, what difference
are a few dozen (or even a few hundred) nuclear reactors going to make? But I’m
deeply troubled both by his certainty about the fate that now awaits us, and by
the disempowering effect that this has on people struggling to come to terms with
something that has been largely invisible to them up until now – that the world
really does have non-negotiable limits, that there really are natural laws by which
we humans are constrained as much as any other species. The discovery that ours
is ‘an outlaw civilization’ can be deeply disturbing, but nothing like as disturbing
as the suggestion that there’s nothing we can do to bring ourselves back on the
right side of the law.
This is particularly shocking for young people. I shudder to think just how
angry young people are going to be when they wake up to the full extent of my
generation’s negligence. If you subscribe to that uplifting aphorism that ‘we do not
inherit the Earth from our parents, but borrow it from our children’, then we’ve
really screwed up. Having spent the last 20 years or so in outright denial about
the declining state of the world, we’ve now leapt in one fell swoop from denial to
despair! Having stolen their future, we are about to steal whatever reasons to be
hopeful young people might still have.
22 CAPITALISM AS IF THE WORLD MATTERS

And that’s precisely why I find Jim Lovelock’s disempowering rhetoric so

troubling. We cannot afford to lose the anger of young people – indeed, the anger
of any age-group – as we struggle to set ourselves on a more sustainable path. I just
hope that Jim is wrong, and that the views of the vast majority of climate scientists
(that we still have between 10 to 15 years to put in place the kind of radical
measures that will not protect us from an uncomfortable future – that’s a dead cert
– but will protect us from those runaway, irreversible effects that threaten such
devastation for humankind) are correct.

BREAKDOWN: BREAKTHROUGH OR COLLAPSE?

One of the biggest problems that we face, and not just with climate change, is
the difficulty we have in seeing things as systems rather than as discrete elements
within those systems. When James Lovelock brought out his ground-breaking
book Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth in 1979, one of the principal reasons it
met with such a frosty response from the scientific community was his challenge
to their self-contained complacency, with all of them working away in their
specialist disciplines (geology, biology, climatology, oceanography, atmospheric
chemistry and so on), but more or less indifferent to what was happening outside
the reduced confines of that particular discipline, let alone thinking in terms of
the system as a whole – in this case, the ‘whole Earth system’, or Gaia.
And that system is massively complex. Even those scientists who feel most
confident about today’s consensus on climate change are humbled by its com-
plexity. Understanding the conditions that keep that whole Earth system in some
kind of dynamic equilibrium is the principal intellectual challenge scientists face
today, and all they know for absolute certain is that the system is becoming less
and less stable. The threat of non-linear climate change (characterized by rapid
and essentially unpredictable shifts from one climate state to another); of eco-
system collapse (as explored above); of synergistic effects where change in one
part of the system reacts with change in another part of the system, with wholly
unpredictable consequences; of human-induced discontinuities in the system:
conceptualizing, let alone managing, this level of complexity is still well beyond
our struggling intellectual capabilities.
So it’s hardly surprising, when contemplating this complexity (or even when
finding every excuse under the sun to avoid contemplating it!), that people come
to different conclusions as to the outcome of our current interaction with that
system. To simplify this in my own mind, I describe it as the Lomborg–Lovelock
continuum: at one end of the scale we have the ever-cheerful Bjorn Lomborg, of
Sceptical Environmentalist fame, full of contempt for the wolf-crying Cassandras
of the environment movement, and completely convinced that we have the
intellectual and technological resources already available to overcome any and all
of these problems if we start to get serious about them without further delay.
 CONFLICTING IMPERATIVES 23

At the other, we have James Lovelock himself, whose Revenge of Gaia

descends into such depths of gloom as to crush even the most redoubtable opti-
mist. Lovelock came to the conclusion some time ago that we have already put
sufficient ‘warming’ into the atmosphere to make it impossible for us to stop
certain natural feedback loops dramatically enhancing that relatively small man-
made contribution. Sustainable development is therefore an illusion, because even
if we stopped emitting all greenhouse gases tomorrow, it would make no difference.
All that awaits us is a traumatic process of ‘sustainable retreat’ as nature rebalances
by taking us (or, at least, the majority of us) out of the system altogether.
I rebel in the face of both these polarized scenarios – on a very personal basis.
With great patience, and for the good of my susceptible environmental soul, I’ve
read pretty much everything that Bjorn Lomborg has written over the last few
years, and although I believe he is perfectly sincere in his views (and that these
views are cogently and entertainingly presented), there is a partiality about them,
a complacency, a deep-down lack of humility that I find seriously off-putting. By
contrast, Jim just depresses me. It’s true, of course, that I too may be ‘in denial’ of
a different kind, in needing to believe that there is still an equitable, sustainable,
compassionate future available for all of humankind. How else could I justify the
work I do – especially as I’m not sure I’d be very good at ‘sustainable retreat’, as we
hunker down behind a set of increasingly forlorn physical and political barriers to
protect what’s left of a decent life. What’s more, Jim’s quite a bit older than I am
– and I have two daughters (18 and 15) through whose eyes I look out over the
next 50 years. It just can’t be too late, I say to myself. It just can’t.
So for a long time, I’ve wavered around between those two polar extremes,
seeking some kind of spurious balance between despair in the face of crushing
empirical evidence, and optimism in the knowledge of humankind’s astonishing
problem-solving creativity and adaptability – fashioning in the process an
idiosyncratic brand of ‘apocalyptic optimism’! But out of that murky confusion,
a much clearer sense of exactly where we now are has slowly emerged, an
intellectually robust middle-way, tested out in practice through the work we do
in Forum for the Future with our partners, and with the hundreds of business
people I come into contact with through the Prince of Wales’s Business & the
Environment Programme.
I’ve been immensely strengthened in that process through the discovery
of Thomas Homer-Dixon’s The Upside of Down at the end of 2006. This is
an extraordinary book, in effect recounting his own journey of self-discovery
oscillating between despair and hope in today’s world. So though he’s not as well-
known as either Lovelock or Lomborg, and despite the fact that his name doesn’t
begin with an ‘L’, I’m attributing my middle-way on the Lomborg–Lovelock
continuum to Homer-Dixon – and I hope all three will forgive me for the
outrageous simplifications of their views in Table 1.1 (overleaf )!
24 CAPITALISM AS IF THE WORLD MATTERS

Table 1.1 The Lomborg–Lovelock continuum

THE WORLD CURRENT STATE A TIME OF RADICAL

ACCORDING TO: OF PLAY DISCONTINUITIES

BJORN LOMBORG The natural environment is Many issues much more

much more resilient than pressing than climate
environmentalists make out; change: HIV/Aids, water and
climate change happening, sanitation, education, etc.
but man-made contribution is Poverty a major threat to
small. Best way of protecting stability, as is corruption and
environment is for countries poor governance in Third
to go on getting richer. World.

THOMAS HOMER-DIXON Cheap fossil fuels underpin Climate-related ‘shocks to

a ‘fantasy world’ of massive the system’ start coming fast
population growth and and furious; real possibility
economic development. of ‘synchronous failure’, with
Environmental stresses are lots of things all breaking
more serious than people apart at the same time.
realize, with resilience of An era of ‘mega-terrorism’
most ecosystems being looms unless the West
systematically eroded away. adopts totally different
Unsustainable population security strategies.
growth a major issue.
Politicians treating the
symptoms, not the causes.

!
JAMES LOVELOCK Catastrophe of climate Climate change impacts
change recognized far too accelerate dramatically,
late by politicians, in thrall to exacerbating international
the seduction of exponential tension. Global insurance
economic growth and totally industry collapses; massive
false model of progress. economic and social damage
follows, with politicians
struggling to maintain any
kind of order.
1950–2000 2000–2010

Note: ! = point of irreversibility

 CONFLICTING IMPERATIVES 25

THE WINDOW OF FROM BREAKDOWN TO LONG-TERM FUTURE

OPPORTUNITY BREAKTHROUGH
OR COLLAPSE

!
Technology the answer to Humankind breaks through 9 billion people living
all our problems; continued to better future for all, off comfortably within planet
economic growth the best the back of technological Earth’s natural limits.
driver for change. Crucial revolution. High standards of Environment protected
to find more effective ways living for all, with impressive primarily through effective
of distributing wealth and narrowing of gap between market systems. Human
improving conditions for very rich and poor. Climate numbers start to decline in line
poor. change remains manageable. with UN projections.

Still every opportunity for BREAKTHROUGH

market-based economies
to prosper, with dramatically Renewable energy Slow, often painful recovery.
accelerated transition to a technologies substitute for The politics of sufficiency
low-carbon global economy. large share of fossil fuels. replace politics of excess;

!
Grave doubts about political Western democracies global institutions ensure much
leadership, especially in US, totally redefine meaning fairer distribution of wealth and
China and India: denial a of ‘security’; massive poor. People’s quality of life
major impediment to making investments in family massively improves. Climate
faster progress. planning and restoring stabilizes by around 2075.
exhausted ecosystems.
COLLAPSE

Synchronous failures Economic and social collapse

overwhelm economic and deepens as sea level rises by
political systems; mass more than 2 metres; political
migration from poor world systems implode, communities
countries into Europe struggle to survive. Massive
and America. Average loss of life; average
temperature increases by temperatures continue to rise.
2.5°C by 2050.
Belated efforts to put things Runaway climate change There is no long-term future for
right, including huge new kicks in; politicians powerless humankind.
investments in nuclear power. to contain effects of
But many nuclear reactors collapsing ecosystems and
swept away by rising sea national economies. Even
levels. Agriculture collapses ‘sustainable retreat’ becomes
in Africa, China and the an impossible dream.
South of America.

2010–2020 2020–2050 2050 →

Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
letter written by Captain Richard Wheatland and published in a
Salem newspaper of 1799 under these stirring headlines:

“A sea Fight gallantly and vigorously maintained by the

Ship Perseverance, Captain Richard Wheatland of this port
against one of the vessels of the Terrible Republic. The
French Rascals, contrary to the Laws of War and Honor,
fought under false colours, whilst the Eagle, true to his
charge, spreads his wings on the American flag.”
“Ship Perseverance,
“Old Straits of Bahama, Jan. 1, 1799.
“Dec. 31st. Key Romain in sight, bearing south, distance
four or five leagues. A schooner has been in chase of us
since eight o’clock, and has every appearance of being a
privateer. At one o’clock P. M. finding the schooner come
up with us very fast, took in steering sails, fore and aft
and royals; at half-past one about ship and stood for her;
she immediately tacked and made sail from us. We fired a
gun to leeward and hoisted the American ensign to our
mizzen peak; she hoisted a Spanish jack at main-top
masthead and continued to run from us. Finding she
outsailed us greatly, and wishing to get through the
Narrows in the Old Straits, at two o’clock P. M. we again
about ship and kept on our course. The schooner
immediately wore, fired a gun to leeward, and kept after
us under a great press of sail. At half-past two she again
fired a gun to leeward, but perceiving ourselves in the
Narrows above mentioned, we kept on to get through
them if possible before she came up with us, which we
effected.
 Elias Hasket Derby mansion (1799-1816)

Prince House. Home of Richard Derby. Built about 1750

 “At three o’clock finding ourselves fairly clear of Sugar
Key and Key Laboas, we took in steering sails, wore ship,
hauled up our courses, piped all hands to quarters and
prepared for action. The schooner immediately took in
sail, hoisted an English Union flag, and passed under our
lee at a considerable distance. We wore ship, she did the
same and we passed each other within half a musket. A
fellow hailed us in broken English and ordered the boat
hoisted out and the captain to come on board with his
papers, which he refused. He again ordered our boat out
and enforced his orders with a menace that in case of
refusal he would sink us, using at the same time the vilest
and most infamous language it is possible to conceive of.
“By this time he had fallen considerably astern of us; he
wore and came up on our starboard quarter, giving us a
broadside as he passed our stern, but fired so excessively
wild that he did us very little injury, while our stern-
chasers gave him a noble dose of round shot and
lagrange. We hauled the ship to wind and as he passed
poured a whole broadside into him with great success.
Sailing faster than we he ranged considerably ahead,
tacked and again passed, giving us a broadside and a
furious discharge of musketry which they kept up
incessantly until the latter part of the engagement.
“His musket balls reached us in every direction, but his
large shot either fell short or went considerably over us
while our guns loaded with round shot and square bars of
iron, six inches long, were plied so briskly and directed
with such good judgment that before he got out of range
we had cut his mainsail and foretopsail all to rags and
cleared his decks so effectively that when he bore away
from us there were scarcely ten men to be seen. He then
struck his English flag and hoisted the flag of the Terrible
Republic and made off with all the sail he could carry,
much disappointed, no doubt, at not being able to give us
a fraternal embrace.
“The wind being light and knowing he would outsail us,
added to a solicitude to complete our voyage, prevented
our pursuing him; indeed we had sufficient to gratify our
revenge for his temerity, for there was scarcely a single
fire from our guns but what spread entirely over his hull.
The action which lasted an hour and twenty minutes, we
conceive ended well, for exclusive of preserving the
property entrusted to our care, we feel confidence that we
have rid the world of some infamous pests of society. We
were within musket shot the whole time of the
engagement, and were so fortunate as to receive but very
trifling injury. Not a person on board met the slightest
harm. Our sails were a little torn and one of the
quarterdeck guns dismounted.
“The privateer was a schooner of 80 or 90 tons, copper
bottom, and fought five or six guns on a side. We are now
within forty-eight hours sail of Havana, where we expect
to arrive in safety; indeed we have no fear of any
privateer’s preventing us unless greatly superior in force.
The four quarterdeck guns will require new carriages, and
one of them was entirely dismounted.
“We remain with esteem,
“Gentlemen,
“Your Humble Servant,
“Richard Wheatland.”

FOOTNOTES:
 [24] The edition of 1800 of this popular compendium of
knowledge bore on the title page: “A New Geographical, Historical
and Commercial Grammar and Present State of the Several
Kingdoms of the World. Illustrated with a Correct Set of Maps,
Engraved from the Most Recent Observations and Draughts of
Geographical Travellers. The Eighteenth Edition Corrected and
Considerably enlarged. London. 1800.”
The work contained “Longitude, Latitude, Bearings and
Distances of Principal Places from London” as one of its
qualifications for use among mariners.
 CHAPTER XI
PIONEERS IN DISTANT SEAS

(1775-1817)

T HE name of Joseph Peabody takes rank with that of Elias Hasket

Derby as an American who did much to upbuild the commerce,
wealth and prestige of his nation in its younger days. It may sound
like an old-fashioned doctrine in this present age of concentration of
wealth at the expense of a sturdy and independent citizenship, to
assert that such men as Joseph Peabody deserve much more honor
for the kind of manhood they helped to foster than for the riches
they amassed for themselves. They did not seek to crush
competition, to drive out of business the men around them who
were ambitious to win a competence on their own merits and to call
themselves free citizens of a free country. Those were the days of
equal opportunities, which shining fact finds illustration in the career
of Joseph Peabody, for example, who, during his career as a ship
owner, advanced to the rank of master thirty-five of his fellow
townsmen who had entered his employ as cabin boys or seamen.
Every one of these shipmasters, “if he had the stuff in him,” became
an owner of shipping, a merchant with his own business on shore,
an employer who was eager, in his turn, to advance his own masters
and mates to positions of independence in which they might work
out their own careers.
During the early years of the nineteenth century, Joseph Peabody
built and owned eighty-three ships which he freighted on his own
account and sent to every corner of the world. The stout square-
riggers which flew the Peabody house flag made thirty-eight voyages
to Calcutta, seventeen to Canton, thirty-two to Sumatra, forty-seven
to St. Petersburg, and thirty to other ports of Europe. To man this
noble fleet no fewer than seven thousand seamen signed shipping
articles in the counting room of Joseph Peabody. The extent of his
commerce is indicated by the amount of duties paid by some of
these ships. In 1825 and 1826, the Leander, a small brig of two
hundred and twenty-three tons, made two voyages to Canton which
paid into the Salem Custom House duties of $86,847, and $92,392
respectively. In 1829, 1830, and 1831, the Sumatra, a ship of less
than three hundred tons, came home from China with cargoes, the
duties on which amounted to $128,363; $138,480, and $140,761.
The five voyages named, and all of them were made in ships no
larger than a small two-masted coasting schooner of to-day, paid in
duties a total of almost six hundred thousand dollars.
Typical of the ships which won wealth and prestige for Joseph
Peabody, was the redoubtable George which was the most
successful vessel of her period. For twenty-two years she was in the
East India trade, making twenty-one round voyages with such
astonishing regularity as to challenge comparison with the schedules
of the cargo tramps of to-day. She was only one hundred and ten
feet in length, with a beam of twenty-seven feet, but during her
staunch career the George paid into the United States Treasury as
duties on her imports more than six hundred thousand dollars.
She was built in 1814 by a number of Salem ship carpenters who
had been deprived of work by the stagnation of the War of 1812.
They intended to launch her as a co-operative privateer, to earn her
way by force of arms when peaceable merchantmen were driven
from the high seas. But the war ended too soon to permit these
enterprising shipwrights to seek British plunder and they sold the
George to Joseph Peabody. She sailed for India in 1815, with hardly
a man in her company, from quarterdeck to forecastle, more than
twenty-one years of age. Every man aboard of her could read and
write, and most of the seamen had studied navigation.
Not always did these enterprising and adventurous Salem lads
return to their waiting mothers. In the log of the George for a
voyage to Calcutta in 1824, the mate has drawn with pencil a
tombstone and a weeping willow as a tribute to one Greenleaf
Perley, a young seaman who died in that far-off port. The mate was
a poet of sorts and beneath the headstone he wrote these lines:

“The youth ambitious sought a sickly clime,

His hopes of profit banished all his fears;
His was the generous wish of love divine,
To sooth a mother’s cares and dry her tears.”

Joseph Peabody began his sea life when a lad in his teens in the
hardy school of the Revolutionary privateersmen. He made his first
cruise in Elias Hasket Derby’s privateer, Bunker Hill, and his second
in the Pilgrim owned by the Cabots of Beverly. A little later he
became second officer of a letter of marque ship, the Ranger, owned
by Boston and Salem shipping merchants. It was while aboard the
Ranger that young Peabody won his title as a fighting seaman.
Leaving Salem in the winter of 1781-82, the Ranger carried salt to
Richmond, and loaded with flour at Alexandria for Havana. Part of
this cargo of flour was from the plantation of George Washington,
and the immortal story of the hatchet and the cherry tree must have
been known in Cuba even then, for the Spanish merchants
expressed a preference for this brand of flour and showed their
confidence by receiving it at the marked weight without putting it on
the scales.
The Ranger returned to Alexandria for another cargo of flour, and
on July 5th, 1782, dropped down the Potomac, ready for sea. Head
winds compelled her to anchor near the mouth of the river. At three
o’clock of the following night, the seaman on watch ran aft, caught
up a speaking trumpet, and shouted down to the sleeping officers in
the cabin that two boats were making for the ship. Captain Simmons
and Lieutenant Peabody rushed up the companionway, and as they
reached the deck, received a volley of musketry from the darkness.
Captain Simmons fell, badly wounded, and Peabody ran forward in
his night clothes, calling to the crew to get their boarding pikes. He
caught up a pike and with a brave and ready seaman named Kent,
sprang to the bows and engaged in a hand to hand fight with the
boarding party which was already pouring over the rail from the boat
alongside.
The Ranger’s crew rallied and held the deck against this invasion
until a second boat made fast in another quarter and swept the deck
with musket fire. The first officer was in the magazine below,
breaking out ammunition, the captain was wounded, and the
command of this awkward situation fell upon Lieutenant, or Second
Officer Peabody, who was a conspicuous mark in his white nightshirt.
He ordered cold shot heaved into the boats to sink them if possible,
and one of them was smashed and sunk in short order.
Peabody then mustered his crew against the boarding party from
the other boat, and drove them overboard. After the Ranger’s decks
had been cleared in fierce and bloody fashion and the fight was
won, it was found that one of her crew was dead, three wounded,
the captain badly hurt, and although Peabody had not known it in
the heat of action, he had stopped two musket balls and bore the
marks of a third. One of the very able seamen of the Ranger had
seen a boarder about to fire point-blank at Peabody and with a
sweep of his cutlass he cut off the hand that held the pistol. For this
service Peabody made the seaman a life-long pensioner, showing
that his heart was in the right place in more ways than one.
 Joseph Peabody

The Ranger carried twenty men and seven guns at this time, and
the enemy attempted to carry the ship with sixty men in two barges,
their loss being more than forty in killed and wounded. They were
later ascertained to be a band of Tories who had infested the bay of
the mouth of the Potomac for some time, and had captured a brig of
ten guns and thirty men a few days before this. The Ranger sailed
up to Alexandria to refit and land her wounded, and the merchants
of the town presented the ship with a silver mounted boarding-pike
in token of their admiring gratitude for her stout defense. This
trophy became the property of Joseph Peabody and was highly
prized as an adornment of his Salem mansion in later years.
When the Ranger went to sea again, Thomas Perkins of Salem,
her first officer, was given the command and Peabody sailed with
him as chief mate. Thus began a friendship which later became a
business partnership in which Perkins amassed a large fortune of his
own. Peabody sailed as a shipmaster for a Salem firm for several
years after peace came, and at length bought a schooner, the Three
Friends, in which he traded to the West Indies and Europe. The story
of his career thereafter was one of successful speculation in ships
and cargoes and of a growing fleet of deep-water vessels until his
death in 1844, a venerable man of large public spirit, and shining
integrity, a pillar of his state and town, whose fortune had been won
in the golden age of American enterprise in remote seas.
William Gray completed the triumvirate of Salem ship owners of
surpassing sagacity and success, his name being rightfully linked
with those of Elias Hasket Derby and Joseph Peabody. He served his
apprenticeship in the counting room of Richard Derby and was one
of the earliest American shipping merchants to seek the trade of
Canton and the ports of the East Indies. In 1807 he owned fifteen
ships, seven barks, thirteen brigs, and one schooner, or one-fourth
of the tonnage of the port. He became the lieutenant governor of
the Commonwealth and left a princely fortune as the product of his
farsighted industry.
For the information of those unfamiliar with the records of that
epoch on the seas, the rapidity with which these lords of maritime
trade acquired their fleets and the capital needed to freight and man
them, it may be worth while to give a concrete example of the
profits to be won in those ventures of large risks and larger stakes. A
letter written from the great shipping house of the Messrs. Perkins in
Boston to their agents in Canton in 1814, goes to show that the
operations of the captains of industry of the days of Derby and Gray
and Peabody would have been respected by the capitalists of this
twentieth century. Here is the kind of Arabian Night’s Entertainment
in the way of dazzling rewards which these old-time merchants
planned to reap:

“To Messers. Perkins and Co. Canton, Jan. 1, 1814.

“You say a cargo laid at Canton would bring three for

one in South America, and your copper would give two
prices back. Thus, $30,000 laid out in China would give
you $90,000 in South America, one half of which laid out
in copper would give one hundred per cent, or $90,000,
making $135,000 for $30,000.
“60,000 pounds of indigo even at 80 cents, $48,000;
120 tons of sugar at $60, or $7,200, and cotton or some
other light freight, say skin tea, $20,000, in all $75,000,
would be worth $400,000 here, and not employ the profits
of the voyage to South America. Manila sugar is worth
$400 or $500 per ton here, clear of duty. The ship should
be flying light, her bottom in good order, the greatest
vigilance used on the voyage and make any port north of
New York.
“(signed) Thomas H. Perkins and James Perkins.”
 It was the heyday of opportunity for youth. Robert Bennet Forbes,
by way of example, was the nephew of this Thomas Perkins of
Boston, and likewise became a wealthy merchant and ship owner.
Young Forbes went to sea before the mast as a boy of thirteen. He
has told how his mother equipped him with a supply of thread,
needles, buttons, etc., in his ditty-bag, also some well-darned socks,
a Testament, a bottle of lavender water, one of essence of
peppermint, a small box of broken sugar and a barrel of apples.
“She wanted to give me a pillow and some sheets and pillow cases,”
he writes, “but I scorned the idea, having been told that sailors
never used them, but usually slept with a stick of wood with the
bark on for a pillow. My good mother who had been at sea herself
and fully realized the dangers and temptations to which I should be
exposed, felt that there could be but one more severe trial for her,
and that was to put me in my grave. My uncle contributed a letter
full of excellent advice, recommending me to fit myself to be a good
captain and promising to keep me in mind. William Sturgiss, who
had much experience of the sea, took an interest in me and gave me
this advice:
“‘Always go straight forward, and if you meet the Devil cut him in
two and go between the pieces; if any one imposes on you, tell him
to whistle against a northwester and to bottle up moonshine.’”
Forbes was 15 years old when Mr. Cushing, of the firm’s shipping
house in Canton, wrote to Thomas H. Perkins in Boston:
“I have omitted in my letters per Nautilus, mentioning our young
friend Bennet Forbes, recommending his being promoted to be an
officer on the return of the Canton packet. He is without exception
the finest lad I have ever known, and has already the stability of a
man of thirty. During the stay of the ship I have had him in the office
and have found him as useful as if he had been regularly brought up
in the business; he has profited so much by the little intercourse he
has had with the Chinese that he is now more competent to transact
business than one half of the supercargoes sent out.”
 The Crowninshield family of Salem earned very unusual distinction
on salt water and a national fame as men of affairs and statecraft.
There were six brothers of them, born of a seafaring father and
grandfather, and this stalwart half dozen Crowninshields one and all,
went to sea as boys. One died of fever at Guadaloupe at the age of
fourteen while captain’s clerk of a Salem ship. The five surviving
brothers commanded ships before they were old enough to vote,
and at one time the five were absent from Salem, each in his own
vessel, and three of them in the East India trade.
“When little boys they were all sent to a common school and
about their eleventh year began their first particular study which
should develop them as sailors and ship captains. These boys
studied their navigation as little chaps of twelve years old and were
required to thoroughly master the subject before being sent to sea.
It was common in those days to pursue their studies by much
writing out of problems, and boys kept their books until full. Several
such are among our family records and are interesting in the
extreme, beautifully written, without blots or dog’s ears, and all the
problems of navigation as practised then, are drawn out in a neat
and in many cases a remarkably handsome manner. The designing
of vessels was also studied and the general principles of construction
mastered.
“As soon as the theory of navigation was mastered, the
youngsters were sent to sea, sometimes as common sailors, but
commonly as ship’s clerks, in which position they were enabled to
learn everything about the management of a ship without actually
being a common sailor.”[25]
 Hon. Jacob Crowninshield

This method of nautical education was of course open only to

those of considerable influence who wished to fit their sons to
become merchants as well as shipmasters. It seems to have been
remarkably efficient in training the five Crowninshields. One of these
shipmasters, Benjamin W., became Secretary of the Navy under
Jefferson, and United States Congressman, while another brother,
Jacob, was a Congressman from 1803 to 1805 and had the honor of
declining a seat in Jefferson’s Cabinet. Jacob Crowninshield,
however, earned a more popular kind of fame by bringing home
from India in 1796, the first live elephant ever seen in America. It is
probable that words would be wholly inadequate to describe the
sensation created by this distinguished animal when led through the
streets of Salem, with a thousand children clamoring their awe and
jubilation.[26] It is recorded that this unique and historical elephant
was sold for ten thousand dollars.
The eldest of these brothers, Captain George Crowninshield, who
served his years at sea, from forecastle to cabin, and then retired
ashore to become a shipping merchant, was the patriotic son of
Salem who chartered the brig Henry, manned her with a crew of
shipmasters and sailed to Halifax to bring home the bodies of
Lawrence and Ludlow after the defeat of the Chesapeake by the
Shannon. Those who knew him have handed down a vivid
description of his unusual personality. He was robust and daring
beyond the ordinary, and a great dandy in his small clothes and
Hessian boots with gold tassels. “His coat was wonderful in cloth,
pattern, trimmings and buttons, and his waistcoat was a work of art.
He wore a pigtail and on top of all a bell-crowned beaver hat, not
what is called a beaver to-day, but made of beaver skin, shaggy like
a terrier dog.”
Captain George has the distinction of being the first American
yacht owner. As early as 1801 he had built in Salem a sloop called
the Jefferson in which he cruised for several years. She was turned
into a privateer in the War of 1812. While the Jefferson was beyond
doubt the first vessel built for pleasure in this country, and the first
yacht that ever flew the Stars and Stripes, her fame is overshadowed
by that of the renowned Cleopatra’s Barge, the second yacht owned
by Captain Crowninshield, and the first of her nation to cruise in
foreign waters. The Cleopatra’s Barge was a nine-days’ wonder from
Salem to the Mediterranean, and was in many ways one of the most
remarkable vessels ever launched.
Her owner found himself at forty-nine years in the prime of his
adventurous energy with his occupation gone. The shipping firm
founded by his father had been dissolved, and this member of the
house fell heir to much wealth and leisure. Passionately fond of the
sea and sailors he determined to build the finest vessel ever
dreamed of by a sober-minded American, and to cruise and live
aboard her for the remainder of his days. There were no other
yachts to pattern after, wherefore the Cleopatra’s Barge was
modeled and rigged after the fashion of a smart privateer, or sloop-
of-war.
When she was launched in Salem harbor in 1817, at least a
thousand curious people visited her every day she lay in port. Her
fittings were gorgeous for her time, what with Oriental draperies,
plate glass mirrors, sideboards, and plate. She was eighty-seven feet
long, and in dimensions almost the counterpart of the famous sloop
Mayflower of modern times. When she was ready for sea, this yacht
had cost her owner fifty thousand dollars. She was rigged as a
brigantine, and carried a mighty press of sail, studding-sails on the
fore-yards, sky-sail, “ring-tail,” “water-sail,” and other handkerchiefs
now unknown.
With that bold individuality of taste responsible for the yellow
curricle in which Captain George was wont to dazzle Salem, when he
drove through the streets, he painted his yacht in different colors
and patterns along her two sides. To starboard she showed a hull of
horizontal stripes laid on in most of the colors of the rainbow. To
port she was a curious “herring-bone” pattern of brilliant hues. Her
stern was wide and pierced with little cabin windows.
With his cousin Benjamin as skipper, and a friend, Samuel Curwen
Ward, the owner sailed for the Mediterranean on what was destined
to be a triumphant voyage. He had prepared himself with no fewer
than three hundred letters of introduction to eminent civil, military
and naval persons of Italy, Spain and other countries. The cook of
the Cleopatra’s Barge was a master of his craft, the stock of wine
was choice and abundant, and if ever an open-handed yachtsman
sailed the deep it was this Salem pioneer of them all.
The vessel was the sensation of the hour in every port. Her
journal recorded that an average of more than three thousand
visitors came aboard on every pleasant day while she was in foreign
ports, and that in Barcelona eight thousand people came off to
inspect her in one day. Wherever possible the owner chartered a
band of music or devised other entertainment for his guests. His
yacht was more than a pleasure barge, for he had the pleasure of
beating the crack frigate United States in a run from Carthagena to
Port Mahone, and on the way to Genoa she logged thirteen knots for
twelve hours on end.
It was at Genoa that an Italian astronomer of considerable
distinction, Baron von Zack, paid a visit on board and several years
later recorded his impressions of the Cleopatra’s Barge in a volume,
written in French, and published in Genoa in 1820.
“How does it happen that the Commanders of French vessels, with
thirty-four schools of Hydrography established in the Kingdom, either
know not, or do not wish to know, how to calculate the longitude of
their vessels by Lunar distances, while even the cooks and negroes
of American vessels understand it?
“I will now relate what I once witnessed on board an American
vessel, the Cleopatra’s Barge, which arrived in the month of July,
1817, at the port of Genoa from Salem, one of the handsomest
Towns in the State of Massachusetts, U. S. A., Lat. 42° 35′ 20″ N.,
Long. 73° 9′ 30″ W. All the city crowded to see this magnificent
palace of Neptune; more than 20,000 persons had visited this
superb floating palace, and were astonished at its beauty, luxury and
magnificence. I went among others. The owner was on board; he
was a gentleman of fortune of Salem, who had amassed great riches
during the late war with Great Britain. He was brother to the
Secretary of the Navy of the United States.
“This elegant vessel was built for his own amusement, after his
own ideas, upon a plan and model new in very many respects, and
was considered the swiftest sailer in America. He had traveled or
sailed for his pleasure in this costly jewel (bijou) that appeared more
the model of a cabinet of curiosities than a real vessel. He had left
America in this charming shell (coquille) for the purpose of visiting
Europe and making the tour of the Mediterranean & had already
touched at the ports of Spain, France, Italy, the Archipelago,
Dardanelles, coasts of Asia, Africa, etc. We have since heard of the
death of this gentleman, a short time after his return to Salem. His
name was George Crowninshield—he was of German origin—his
ancestor was a Saxon officer who, having the misfortune to kill his
adversary in a duel, sought refuge in America. The captain of this
beautiful vessel was a lively old gentleman, a cousin to Mr.
Crowninshield—his son, a young man, was also on board. I shall not
here enter into detail concerning the remarkable construction of this
vessel, still less her splendor—the public journals have already
noticed them.
 Benjamin Crowninshield

“In making some enquiries respecting my friends and

correspondents in Philadelphia and Boston, among others I
mentioned Dr. Bowditch. ‘He is the friend of our family, and our
neighbor in Salem,’ replied the old Captain. ‘My son, whom you see
there, was his pupil; it is properly he, and not myself, that navigates
this vessel; question him and see if he has profited by his
instructions.’
“I observed to this young man, ‘you have had so excellent a
teacher in Hydrography that you cannot fail of being well acquainted
with the science. In making Gibralter what was the error in your
longitude?’ The young man replied, ‘Six miles.’ ‘Your calculations
were then very correct; how did you keep your ship’s accounts?’ ‘By
chronometers and by Lunar observations.’ ‘You then can ascertain
your Longitude by Lunar distances?’
“Here my young captain appearing to be offended with my
question, replied with some warmth, ‘What! I know how to calculate
Lunar distances! Our cook can do that!’ ‘Your cook!’ Here Mr.
Crowninshield and the old Captain assured me, that the cook on
board could calculate Longitude quite well; that his taste for it
frequently led him to do it. ‘That is he,’ said the young man, pointing
to a Negro in the after part of the vessel, with a white apron about
his waist, a fowl in one hand, and a carving knife in the other.
‘Come here, John,’ said the old Captain to him, ‘this gentleman is
surprised that you understand Lunar observations. Answer his
questions.’ I asked, ‘By what method do you calculate Lunar
distances?’ The cook answered, ‘It is immaterial—I use some time
the method of Maskelyne, Lyons, or Bowditch, but I prefer that of
Dunthorne, as I am more accustomed to it.’ I could hardly express
my surprise at hearing that black-face answer in such a manner, with
a bloody fowl and carving knife in his hands.
 “‘Go,’ said Mr. Crowninshield, ‘lay aside your fowl and bring your
books and journal and show your calculations to the gentleman.’ The
cook returned with his books under his arms, consisting of
Bowditch’s Practical Navigator, Maskelyne’s Requisite Tables, Hutton’s
Logarithms and the Nautical Almanack, abridged from the Greenwich
Edition. I saw all the calculations this Negro had made on his
passage, of Latitude, Longitude, Apparent Time, etc. He replied to all
my questions with admirable precision, not merely in the phrases of
a cook, but in correct nautical language.
“This cook had sailed as cabin-boy with Captain Cook in his last
voyage round the world and was acquainted with several facts
relative to the assassination of the celebrated navigator at Owhyhee,
February, 1779. ‘The greatest part of the seamen on board the
Barge,’ said Mr. Crowninshield, ‘can use the sextant and make
nautical calculations.’
“Indeed Mr. Crowninshield had with him many instructors. At
Genoa he had taken one acquainted with Italian—he had also on
board an instructor in the French language, a young man who had
lost his fingers in the Russian campaign. What instruction! what
order! what correctness! what magnificence was to be observed in
this Barge; I could relate many more interesting particulars
concerning this true Barque of Cleopatra.”
The editor of the Diario di Roma newspaper of Rome considered
the Cleopatra’s Barge worthy of a eulogistic notice, a translation of
which was printed in the Essex Register of October 11, 1817:
“Soon after the visit of the fleet, there anchored in our port a
schooner from America, of a most beautiful construction, elegantly
found, very light, and formed for fast sailing, and armed like our
light armed vessels. It was named the Cleopatra, belonging to a very
rich traveller, George Crowninshield, of Salem, who constructed her
for his own use, and for the voyages he had undertaken in company
with Captain Benjamin Crowninshield, his cousin. Besides the
extreme neatness of everything about the vessel to fit her for sea,
her accommodations were surprising and wonderful. Below was a
hall of uncommon extent, in which the luxury of taste, the riches
and elegance of the furniture, the harmony of the drapery, and of all
the ornaments, inspired pleasure and gallantry. The apartment of
the stern was equally rich and interesting. Five convenient bed
chambers displayed with that same elegance, were at the service of
the Captain, with an apartment for the plate of every kind, with
which it was filled. Near was another apartment which admitted all
the offices of a kitchen, and in it was a pump with three tubes which
passed through the vessel, to supply water from the sea, or
discharge what they pleased, with the greatest ease.
“The rich and distinguished owner had with him beside his family
servants, several linguists, persons of high talent in music, and an
excellent painter. Everything to amuse makes a part of the daily
entertainment. The owner and Captain were affable, pleasing and
civil, and gave full evidence of the talents, the industry and the good
taste of their nation, which yields to none in good sense and true
civility. The above travellers having complied with the usual rules of
the city, upon receiving a particular invitation, he visited the
Cleopatra in company with many persons of distinction, and partook
of an elegant collation.”
The Salem Gazette of Sept. 26, 1817, contained the following
“extract of a letter from a gentleman on board the Cleopatra’s
Barge”:

“Barcelona, June 8.
“You have undoubtedly heard of our movements in the
Mediterranean; indeed you must have heard of us, from
every place at which we have touched—for the Cleopatra’s
Barge is more celebrated abroad than at home. Even the
Moors of Tangier visited us tho’ they abhor the Christians.
At Gibralter the Englishmen were astonished. In Malaga,
Carthagena and this place the Spaniards have been
thunderstruck. For these four days past the whole of this
 great city has been in an uproar. They begin to crowd on
board at daylight, and continue to press upon us till night.
This morning the Mole was so crowded with people
waiting to come on board, that we have been obliged to
get under weigh, and stand out of the Mole, yet the boats,
with men, women and children, are rowing after us. Thus
it has been in every place we have visited. In Port Mahon
we were visited by all the officers of our squadron.”

Further tidings were conveyed to the admiring townspeople of

Salem by means of an article in the Essex Register under date of
Oct. 25th:
“Having noticed the attention paid to the American barge
Cleopatra, at Rome, we could not refuse the pleasure of assuring our
friends that Capt. G. Crowninshield had been equally successful in
arresting attention in France. The following is an extract from a
Letter dated at Marseilles, 14th July, 1817, from a person long
residing in France: ‘Capt. G. Crowninshield left this port in the
beginning of this month, for Toulon and Italy. During his stay here,
thousands of both sexes were on board of his beautiful Vessel. Every
day it was like a continual procession. It gave me the utmost
pleasure, as the universal opinion was that no vessel could compare
with this Vessel. I felt proud that such a splendid specimen of what
could be done in the United States was thus exhibited in Europe. We
consider it as an act of patriotism. The Vessel was admired. The
exquisite taste in her apartments greatly astonished the French for
their amour propre had inclined them to believe that only in France
the true gout was known.’”
Ship Ulysses—This painting shows a jury rudder about to be put in
place at sea, in 1806. So ingenious was the display of
seamanship in the rigging of this emergency rudder that her
commander, Capt. Wm. Mugford was awarded a medal by the
American Philosophical Society
 Yacht Cleopatra’s Barge, 191 tons, built in Salem, 1816, shows the
“herring-bone” design painted in bright colors on side of the yacht

The Cleopatra’s Barge returned to Salem in triumph, but Captain

George Crowninshield died on board while making ready for a
second voyage abroad. She was sold and converted into a
merchantman, made a voyage to Rio, then rounded the Horn, and at
the Sandwich Islands was sold to King Kamehameha to be used as a
royal yacht. Only a year later her native crew put her on a reef and
the career of the Cleopatra’s Barge was ended in this picturesque
but inglorious fashion.
In reading the old-time stories of the sea, one is apt to forget that
wives and sweethearts were left at home to wait and yearn for their
loved ones, for these logs and journals deal with the day’s work of
strong men as they fought and sailed and traded in many seas. Few
letters which they sent home have been preserved. It is therefore
the more appealing and even touching to find in a fragment of the
log of the ship Rubicon, the expression of such sentiment as most of
these seamen must have felt during the lonely watches in midocean.
It is a curious document, this log, written by a shipmaster whose
name cannot be found in the bundle of tattered sheets rescued from
the rubbish of an old Salem garret.
On the fly leaf is scrawled:
“Boston, May the 11th, 1816. Took a pilot on board the Ship
Rubicon and sailed from Charlestown. 12th of May at 3 P. M. came
to an anchor above the Castle, the wind S.E.”
The ship was bound from Boston to St. Petersburg, and after he
had been a week at sea, her master began to write at the bottom of
the pages of his log certain intimately personal sentiments which he
sought to conceal in a crude cipher of his own devising. The first of
these entries reads as follows as the captain set it down, letter by
letter:
“L nb wvzi druv what hszoo R dirgv go uroo gsrh hsvvg
R droo gvoo blf gszg R ollp blfi ovgvih levi zmw levi zmw
drhs nv rm blf zinh yfg R dzng rm kzgrvmxv gsrmprmt lm
Z szkb nvvgrmt——R zn dvoo.”
It is not easy to fathom why the captain of the good ship Rubicon
should have chosen to make such entries as this in the log. This
much is clear, however, that he longed to say what was in his heart
and he wished to keep it safe from prying eyes. He left no key to his
cipher, but his code was almost childish in its simplicity, and was
promptly unraveled by the finder of the manuscript, David Mason
Little of Salem. The old shipmaster reversed the alphabet, setting
down “Z” for “A,” “Y” for “B,” and so on, or for convenience in
working it out, the letters may be placed as follows:

A—Z N—M
B—Y O—L
C—X P—K
 D—W Q—J
E—V R—I
F—U S—H
G—T T—G
H—S U—F
I—R V—E
J—Q W—D
K—P X—C
L—O Y—B
M—N Z—A

Reading from the top of the column, the letters of the reversed
alphabet are to be substituted for the letters standing opposite them
in their normal order. The passage already quoted therefore
translates itself as follows:
“O, Dear Wife, what shall I write to fill this sheet. I will tell you
that I look your letters over and over and wish me in your arms, but
I wait in patience, thinking on a happy meeting. I am well.”
 Log of the good ship Rubicon, showing the captain’s cipher at the
bottom of the page

Other messages which this sailor wrote from his heart and
confided to his cipher in the log of the Rubicon read in this wise:
“My Heart within me (is) ashes. I want to see my loving Wife and
press her to my bosom. But, O, my days are gone and past no more
to return forever.”

“True, undivided and sincere love united with its own object is one
of the most happy Passions that possesses the human heart.”

“Joanna, this day brings to my mind grateful reflections.

“This is the day that numbers thirty years of my Dear’s life. O, that
I could lay in her arms to-night and recount the days that have
passed away in youthful love and pleasure.”

“The seed is sown, it springs up and grows to maturity, then drops

its seed and dies away, while the young shoot comes up and takes
its place. And so it is with Man that is born to die.”
Now and then a sea tragedy is so related in these old log books
that the heart is touched with a genuine sympathy for the victim, as
if he were more than a name, as if he were a friend or a neighbor. It
is almost certain that no one alive to-day has ever heard of Aaron
Lufkin, able seaman, who sailed from Calcutta for the Cape of Good
Hope in the year 1799. The ship’s clerk, William Cleveland of Salem,