Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (20 page)

“This is like taking a front-end loader and scraping up your entire front garden and shredding it, keeping a few pebbles, and dumping the rest of it down the drain,” says the Spirit. “Couple this with overfishing — really easy to do with megaships equipped with sonar for fast fish finding — and the eventual result is no fish. When smaller boats were still in use, fisheries were sustainable, more or less. But in the past forty years, hyper-efficient hi-tech practices have put paid to a third of the productive ocean. People think it will grow back, and maybe it will, but not for thousands of years. Now you’ve got bigger and bigger boats chasing smaller and fewer fish. The dumb thing is, the fishing fleets that are causing the most damage are subsidized by their governments, so people aren’t paying anything near the cost of the fish they’re eating, not directly. But they’re paying through their taxes.”

“Taxes!” yelps Scrooge. Taxes are a sore spot with him. “You mean, I’m paying for all this effing waste?”

“That’s not the only effing waste you’re paying for,” says the Spirit. “Need I mention the farm policies of certain governments, which subsidize biofuels that cost more energy to produce than the energy that comes back out of them? And the real cost is much higher when you factor in the cost to the land — the soil depletion, and the destruction caused to biosystems by pesticides and herbicides. Then there’s the effect on world food prices when you burn food crops instead of eating them — taking biomass out of circulation and replacing it with smoke. With the overfishing, though, help may be at hand: when fuel prices climb too high, those megaships will cost too much to run, especially since they won’t have many fish left to, as they say, ‘harvest,’ the catch per effort having declined 80 percent in thirty years.”

Scrooge doesn’t feel so good. He can hear his Chilean sea bass dinner reproaching him from inside his stomach.

Next they visit the Amazonian rainforest, which is being mowed down at great speed to allow a few short years of soybean and cattle production; and then the Congo, where deforestation is proceeding at a galloping speed; and then the boreal forests in the north, where trees are being munched up like toothpicks. “A mature tree creates two-thirds of the oxygen a human being needs to breathe,” the Spirit comments. “Level millions of trees and make millions of new people every year, and what will happen to the air quality? I won’t even mention the floods and soil erosion and subsequent droughts that are the predictable results of cutting trees in the wrong places.”

They cruise over the Antarctic, where huge shelves of ice are breaking off and melting, and the Arctic, where the thawing tundra is releasing immense clouds of methane gas. They monitor rising sea levels, and watch while people drown or flee, and check out a couple of superforce cyclones as they zero in on populous low-lying shorelines.

“Can’t you stop all this?” Scrooge cries.

“International laws in this area are hard to achieve,” says the Spirit, “because no one can agree on what’s fair. It’s like monkeys: if one has a grape, the others all want grapes. ‘You’ve ruined your own ecology for profit,’ say the poorer countries, ‘so don’t tell us not to do the same.’ The killing of the Earth is driven on by poverty on the one hand and greed on the other. Keep in mind also that many of the countries where the most destruction is going on are heavily in debt to the rich ones. So the killing is also driven on by debt.

“The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank — begun in the 1940s to so-called help the so-called developing world — convinced the often-unscrupulous leaders in those countries to borrow lots of money. The leaders were then at liberty to overspend, and to grind their own peasants in order to pay back the ever-accumulating debts. In desperation, the peasants overfarmed the land, which reduced their crop yields and made them even poorer and more subject to famines than they were before. It’s a lot like the Roman Empire’s tax-farming system: a top-down method of extracting wealth from the poor. The result is what we have today: the incomes of the twenty-five million richest individuals on the planet have a combined net worth that equals the combined net worth of the two billion poorest people on the planet.”

Scrooge is about to say that rich people deserve to be rich because of their superior genes and moral fibre, but he catches the Spirit frowning at him and refrains.

“Wouldn’t you say,” says the Spirit, “that there’s a great incentive for people to do what they’ve done so often before when the imbalance between debt and credit — and poverty and wealth — becomes too great, and the poor find themselves sinking and dying under their crushing debt loads, and the human sense of fairness and justice becomes too outraged? They depose their leaders; or they kill their creditors, if they can get hold of them; or they simply default on their loans.”

“But that would screw up the whole system,” says Scrooge.

“You miss my point,” says the Spirit. “It’s already screwed up.”

DESCENDING FROM
the stratosphere, they find themselves at a dinner party in Toronto. No starving peasants here; the table is loaded with food and drink. Well-dressed people are engaged in friendly converse. The subject is the world food shortage of spring 2008 and the food riots that have quickly resulted.

“It’s the food speculators,” one guest is saying. “They’re hoarding. Do you know how many billions the big corporations have made out of this?”

“No, there really isn’t enough food,” says a second guest.

“We always can grow more,” another says.

“Sure,” says the second. “Until we can’t. You can’t keep taking and taking without putting back.”

“The Green Revolution has increased production, what with the fertilizers and pesticides and the genetically modified seeds . . .” says another.

“Increased it at first,” says the second. “Then it burned out, leaving dead soil. The only farmers doing well in the so-called Green Revolution parts of India now are the organic ones.”

“What about when all the Chinese and Indians get cars?” says a fourth. “We’ll suffocate!”

“Rising gas prices will put a stop to that,” says the first. “They won’t be able to afford to drive them.”

“Too many people,” says the second. “Only 20 percent of the earth is dry land. Out of this 20 percent only 3 percent is suitable for crop production. Most of the people on Earth live on 2 percent of the land. We’re running out of habitat, and destroying what we have left.”

“We’ve heard these Malthusian predictions before,” says the third.

“That doesn’t mean they aren’t true,” says a fourth.

“Well, anyway,” says a fifth, “nothing I can do will stop whatever it is that’s happening. It’s too big for us! We might as well enjoy ourselves while we can.” And they all lift their glasses to that.

“Don’t be so stupid!” Scrooge barks at them. But they can’t hear him. Their merry laughter fades away, and the next moment he’s back in the 1972 cellar, the one with the older woman and the steamer trunk. But now it’s the present time, and a different older woman is opening the trunk. She finds the envelope left there three or four decades earlier and opens it. “I wonder why Mother saved this,” she says to herself.

Scrooge reads over her shoulder. The clipping is from the
Los Angeles Times
. “By 2042,
MIT
Team Says: Collapse of World Economy Forseen If Growth Goes On,” is the header. The story is about a thirteen-month study commissioned by the Club of Rome and conducted by a team of scientists at mit. “The world economy is headed for collapse within 70 years — bringing widespread pestilence, poverty and starvation — unless economic growth is halted soon,” it begins. “The notion that growth of population and material goods cannot go on forever, because there is only a finite supply of land and natural resources on the earth, is hardly new. It is at least as old as Plato.” It concludes: “These physical limits to growth are likely to be encountered in the lifetime of our children. The study focuses on five major variables: the world’s total non-renewable supply of resources (metal, rock, energy), plus the level of population, the amount of pollution, the rate of industrial output per capita and the amount of food production per capita.”

“They knew!” Scrooge yells. “They knew back then in 1972! Why didn’t they do something, when there was still time?” In his anger he clutches the Spirit of Earth Day Present by his hemp T-shirt and begins shaking him. But the clock is striking twelve, and under his hands the Spirit is dissolving.

IT’S CHANGING TO
something dry and scaly. Now it’s a giant cockroach. “I am the Spirit of Earth Day Future,” it says in a rasping voice.

Scrooge recoils. He hates bugs. “Can’t you look like a human being?” he says.

“That depends on which future you’d like to see,” says the cockroach. “In some of the medium-distant futures, humanity will be extinct, and I can hardly take the shape of a bioform that no longer exists.”

“How about something closer in time, then?” Scrooge wheedles.

“Okay,” says the cockroach. He wavers and dissolves and re-forms: he’s a glinty-eyed thirty-five-year-old in a dark suit and a gold earring, carrying a briefcase. “There,” he says. “Now I’m a futures trader. Which of your own futures would you like to visit?”

“I’ve got more than one?” Scrooge asks.

“With futures, it’s all probability,” says the Spirit. “Futures are infinite in number, as many science-fiction writers have told us. For instance, in one future you’ve had advanced gene therapy and you live to a hundred and fifty; and in another, you get run over by a bus next week.”

“I’ll take a pass on that one,” says Scrooge hastily.

“It’s not all bad,” says the Spirit. “In that future you’ve made a choice for natural burial, so you get reincarnated as a tree. But I see your point. So, the good news or the bad news?”

“The good news first,” says Scrooge, who’s an optimist about himself, despite being a misanthrope when it comes to everyone else.

The Spirit waves his briefcase, and Scrooge finds himself in a cheerful, bustling medium-sized city. All the people are wearing natural-fibre clothing and riding on bicycles or driving around in compressed-air vehicles and using power from wave-generation machines and from solar installations on the tops and sides of their buildings; everyone has given up junk food and is eating a lot of fruits and vegetables, grown on nearby organic farms or on their erstwhile front lawns, where the top-soil has been restored by an extensive program of mulching and composting — a process that, not incidentally, has significantly reduced the carbon dioxide in the air. No one is overweight; all tall buildings turn out their lights during bird migrations, so they’re no longer killing millions of birds every year; evil bottom-scraping fishing practices have been abandoned; air travel takes place by helium airship, water travel by solar-controlled sailing ships; plastic shopping bags have been banned.

All religious leaders have realized that their mandate includes helping to preserve the Almighty’s gift of the Earth and have condoned birth control; there are no more noisy, polluting gas-powered leaf blowers or lawn mowers; and global warming has been dealt with at a summit during which world leaders gave up paranoia, envy, rivalry, power-hunger, greed, and the debate over who should start cutting down the carbon footprint first, and rolled up their sleeves and got on with it.

There is Scrooge himself, looking very fit in a hemp suit, signing several enormous cheques for conservation organizations: rain-forest stewardship, underwater marine parks, bird habitats. “In this future,” says the Spirit, “the albatross has been saved; largely — I must add — through your efforts. I ought to say also that a lot of these miraculous changes have been brought about by a Victory Bond drive, in which people lent to their governments to finance eco-repairs; and through microeconomics, like that already being practised by the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, whereby mini-amounts are lent at fair interest rates to very poor people to help them start local, small-scale businesses; and also through massive and voluntary debt cancellations on the part of the rich nations, like those of the ancient Israelites, who decreed a jubilee year every fifty years in which all debts became void.”

“How probable is this future?” asks Scrooge.

“Not very probable,” the Spirit admits. “Or not yet. But many people in your time are busting a gut to make it happen. Unfortunately, there are a lot more people who are actively opposed to any attempts to help clean up the global mess — a mess that in real terms is costing trillions of dollars a year — because they’re making too much money out of the situation as it is. Now for the bad news.” He waves his briefcase again.

At first Scrooge barely recognizes his future self. He’s gaunt and frantic, and pushing a wheelbarrow full of cash. As he watches, his future self tries to exchange this mountain of money for a can of dog food, but it’s no deal.

“Spirit! What’s happening?” asks Scrooge. This is truly scary.

“You’re witnessing a moment of hyperinflation,” says the Spirit. “This has happened many times in the history of money. When people lose faith in the value of a currency, you need more and more money to buy anything; and those that have items of real use and value — such as food or fuel — don’t want to sell them, because they fear that the money they receive will be worth a lot less the next day. In effect, money simply melts away, like the illusion it always has been. After all, it’s a man-made symbol: it exists only if we agree that it does. And if you can’t change it back into the real things it’s supposed to signify, it’s completely worthless.”

“But if I can’t buy any food, I’ll starve!” Scrooge cries.

“That is indeed a probable result,” says the Spirit. “Being rich in the conventional sense doesn’t help you if there’s nothing you can buy. King Midas wished that everything he touched might turn to gold, and he got his wish; but he starved to death, because the food he touched turned to gold as well. In a world in which everything’s been changed into money, there’s nothing left to eat. Now let’s get the bird’s-eye view.”