Manifesto, Part II

A week or two ago I put up a post called Manifesto.   The idea was to ask myself what I - or what Points of Inflection - should be standing for in these serious days.  It looks as though my own days are short - but if they were long, if I were writing a manifesto for some kind of gathering or movement, what would I emphasize as centrally important?  And in such a document I'd want to bring together both the hard-headed mathematical analysis that I've tried to do, and also the spiritual or even "prophetic" critique which tries to understand the 'principalities and powers' that are in action behind the upheavals of recent times and which we can expect in the future.  So, in the first Manifesto post, I revisited the idea that materialism bears responsibility for our woes, and found it misguided: I felt our problem was that we did not revere materiality enough, not that we revered it too much.


In this second post I want to explore a contrast which I think has to be part of the manifesto: the cycle and the line. (If you like puns, let's call them the exercise cycle and the waste line.)

The cycle versus the line (sketch)

Pardon my less than beautiful sketch.  You can find some much clearer diagrams of the same sort in Mathematics for Sustainability - hint, hint.  What it indicates is a fundamental structural difference between the kinds of processes that are part of the Earth's natural ecosystem and the kinds of processes that tend to be valorized by our industrial society.  The processes of the first kind are cyclic. For instance: Powered by the steady flow of energy from the sun, plants absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, turning it into organic material that we can eat (aka food!) and oxygen that we can breathe.  Animals like us reverse the process.  Nothing is wasted; everything, in principle, can be reused for ever.  By contrast, the processes of the second kind are "one way journeys from resource to waste". For example, high-energy fuel (like oil) is extracted from the ground and converted into plastic.  Plastic is an amazing material especially in its resistance to biological decomposition.  After its useful life, typically a few months, is over, the plastic be thrown "away": but there is no real "away", in fact the plastic will persist in our environment for thousands upon thousands of years.  A throwaway society has been created in which traditional virtues (such as thrift) have been upended and where more and more parts of the Creation can be regarded as "disposable".

My Manifesto would aim to embed this fundamental distinction into the way we think and act at all levels of society.  Certainly the difference between "the cycle and the line" can be taught in school.  Our worship as Christians can emphasize that when we participate in a shared meal (say) - and especially in the great shared meal of Holy Communion - we are also taking part in a natural cycle during which God has caused bread to "spring forth from the earth" and has once again brought forth "the fruit of the vine" - Jewish blessings before food remind us that our elder brethren have been here ahead of us.  I'm also thinking of basic things like accounting processes though.  Standard accounting methods like the measurement of GDP for a nation or the "bottom line" for an individual company are likely to give a high positive value to processes of the "waste line" type - the UK Natural Capital Committee said in 2013 that GDP

focuses on flows, not stocks. As a result, an economy can run down its assets yet, at the same time, record high levels of GDP growth.

If we could change  our basic accounting measures - the basic structure of how we value things in monetary terms - to give a negative value to the "waste line", and if companies and individuals internalized this sufficiently to act on this new measure of value, then our society would move away from "throwaway" and towards "sustainable".  But notice that a change in the basic structure of what is valued above all else is, in truth, a change in our worship. Such a change will not come about without a struggle.

Note: Some might be skeptical of the argument made above from a Biblical Theology perspective.  Didn't we (some of us) learn from the biblical theology movement of the 1950s and 60s about the contrast between "Greek and Hebrew thought", the fact that the Hebrew understanding of God at work in history made it possible to see the world as moving forward, towards a purpose, rather than spinning pointlessly round and round? Isn't what I'm saying just going back on that, in fact reintroducing some kind of Nature-worship? (Many evangelicals are suspicious that this is the secret agenda of the environmental movement anyhow - go Google "resisting the Green Dragon" if you find this hard to believe). But I don't see this objection holding up.  The world that God has made does indeed have a Great Story that moves forward to its consummation in the new heavens and the new earth - but it also has natural cycles of various kinds, many of which are acknowledged and celebrated in Scripture.  It is a pretty poor argument, to claim that since Christian history sees the world moving forward to a new creation, it therefore justifies the creation-dishonoring exploitation of the world as we have it now.