The following article by Jonathon Porritt was previously published in One Earth Magazine Volume 5 Issue 3B June 1985

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Jonathon Porritt, Director of Friends of the Earth and a leading member of the British Ecology Party, is an articulate and inspiring representative of the whole Green movement. He was one of the speakers at the conference on The New Economic Agenda at the Findhorn Foundation last October, and here we share with you a condensed version of his talk at that time.

WHAT I would like to do here is look at the relationship between the new economics and conventional politics, and at what it is about conventional politics that has such a problem with the new economics. To do this I need to suggest something of what the new economics might be, so I will attempt to summarise it in ten simple points. The list is in order of controversy, so the first bits will, I hope, be acceptable to everybody. The bits at the bottom are where you can start walking out.

The first principle of the new economics is that of small scale. Conventional politicians and economists have several problems with this notion, both at the practical and conceptual levels. The left derive most of their power from their base within organised mass labour, particularly through the unions; while for the Tories, big business and multi-nationalisation are practically the sine qua non of economic wealth. Both are used to thinking in terms of macro-economics, so the idea that the whole economy might be based on a small scale understanding of economic wealth is very upsetting.

Linked with this is the idea of decentralisation. This is also a considerable threat to conventional politicians and economists, for whatever end of the scale you look at, it seems to take their power away from them. The nicest form of centralised politics in Britain today is the kind of paternalism characterised by the better part of the Labour Party and the Alliance. The worst is the kind of quasi-totalitarian approach found in certain parts of the Tory Party. Essentially, centralised politics operates from the notion that politicians know best, and that they alone are in a position to distribute benefits to the poor, benighted population which could not possibly get on without them. And whether you go for the paternalist or quasi-totalitarian approach, nothing could be more threatening than the idea of decentralising the whole current political system and power base.

The third principle is one I broadly call work, rather than jobs. We are moving away from an economy where we can talk about creating x-hundred thousand or x-million jobs to one where we talk about the work people do, whether it be in the formal economy, the informal economy, the voluntary economy, the black economy or whatever. At the moment the wealth of society is by and large distributed through the work that people do in that society. People who don’t have jobs are given the crumbs, something to tide them over until they do have a job. But once we separate out the distribution of wealth from the work that people do, we move into an entirely different economy. And it is an economy desperately upsetting to conventional politicians, because one of the means by which they retain power over the electorate is their ability – or inability, depending on the way you look at it – to provide jobs for them.

The fourth point is the shift from surfeit to sufficiency – from the politics of more and more towards the politics of enough. Now, if you strip conventional politics down to its bare essentials, it is no more than an assembly of different people standing up on different platforms and offering different shopping lists to the assorted masses. Practically the only way conventional politicians dare to offer themselves to the electorate today is in terms of promising more. The notion of sufficiency rather than surfeit is therefore deeply challenging because it takes away from them the means by which they summon up the
courage to offer themselves for election in the first place.

Moving on from that is the notion of international equity. We need to talk about sufficiency not only for ourselves but also for everybody on the planet. By and large, conventional politicians today have dismissed the Third World from their concern. They are in the business of winning power, so they pander to the majority of the electorate who, to put it bluntly, don’t give a stuff for the Third World.

Sixthly, and pushing the boat out even further and more distressingly for contemporary politicians, is what the Americans so wonderfully call intergenerational equity. This is quite a simple concept – that the redistribution of wealth does not apply exclusively to one generation or one people at one time. It must apply over the course of generations, so all people to come, as yet unborn, have an equal share of the Earth’s wealth. Frankly, this is the point at which contemporary politics completely parts company with what we are saying. The business of staying in power entails exclusive concentration on a short time scale – the next span of parliament, the next length of time they are in office – and the idea of pitching their horizons a bit further than that is very difficult for them.

The seventh point is a participatory approach to the creation of wealth. It is unfortunately true that conventional socialism today has succeeded only by creating a client body ‘out there’, while contemporary capitalism has succeeded only by creating a passive set of consumers ‘out there’ . Both major British political parties today depend on that passivity in their audience, so the notion of participatory economics in which all people equally share the responsibility of wealth creation is a very significant political challenge.

The eighth point is that of the feminine principle. In a world organised entirely according to masculine principles, the idea of our economics responding first and foremost to the feminine principle is more than challenging to contemporary politicians, it is something they literally have to close down on entirely.

Ninthly, the new economics is not class based. It does not appeal uniquely to one class or sector in society. Now, an interesting question that has come up is whether one of the reasons the new economics has not succeeded is because there is no class backing for it. I’m not sure about this. I suspect that in the long run it will actually become a tremendous liberation as regards winning support rather than a block or constraint.

Lastly, the new economics is biocentric. What this means is that over and above the human component we need to stress the planetary component or the notion of life on Earth. This has a huge philosophical consequence. Most of us live in societies and according to rules that are anthropocentric. They are determined and regulated by those who see the human species as being not only dominant but so dominant that they have the right to control all the rest of life on Earth.

One Earth 5-3B p11Now, if these ten principles do indeed approximate to a description of the new economics, the challenge they entail in hard, pragmatic, political terms is enormous. So where do we go from here? Conventional politicians and economists – I throw this out as a thesis – are incapable of accommodating themselves to these principles fast enough to make enough of a difference.

Some of you might say, “Ditch politics entirely. It is not the political parties in particular that are at fault, be they left, right or centre, but the very business of politics itself. Let us revert to an anarchist model, a breakdown of community into more or less autonomous groups, and rely more on decentralist principles. ” However, I have  little sympathy with this view. I have waged a long campaign against what I call manic minisculism within the Green movement. People who seriously believe that a combination of sporadic and arbitrary decentralised initiatives can actually provide answers for all people on this planet are severely fooling themselves. There is a romantic – almost illusory – attachment to the notion of complete decentralisation that lurks at the back of a lot of Green and alternative thinking, and I believe it renders them incapable of serious political or social analysis. We are looking for something else.

No doubt you are expecting me to say, “Aha! That only leaves Green politics as the answer. Well, possibly. However, I do not think that, as it is presently constituted, Green politics provides the answer either.

The reason is that up until now we have failed to articulate our politics in a way that reaches a broad enough range of people. We have talked eloquently and passionately about how we believe it necessary to respond to the needs of the planet, of other species, of the Third World and of generations as yet unborn. Yet we have neglected one of the major aspects of politics, which is to represent the interests of ordinary people alive today.

One of the things the new economics is beginning to teach the Green movement is a way in which we might reach out to a broader audience. It involves the honest acceptance of self-interest as an aspect of economics. We are realising that we can demonstrate in our economic terms (which rely partly on conventional economics and partly on the economics we find to be important) that the costs of doing things in the industrial way are greater than the benefits we are meant to enjoy as a result. It’s conventional cost/benefit analysis: weighing up the costs and weighing up the benefits. We can also demonstrate that the implications of not realising that we live on a finite planet are so devastating that any politician or economist who fails to take them into account is in the business of fooling the electorate or fooling themselves.

We need to articulate the principles of the new economics in a way that meets people’s immediate self-interest, rather than a set of somewhat transcendental goals or ideals. Is there more in our shopping list – conventionally measured for ordinary people – than there is in the shopping list of ordinary politicians? Now, that may sound to you so appalling a betrayal of the idealism of Green politics that you may wish to have no part in such a process. But in our attempt to articulate the new economics we have to acknowledge some of the inherent problems of politics. In putting this position to you so bluntly, I am hoping to bring you up against the reality of what is involved in changing political beliefs in a society such as ours. However, the notion of the synthesis between idealism and self-interest may not in fact be totally appalling. Let me attempt to demonstrate this by reading one paragraph from my book, Green Politics.

“At the individual level today, wealth means the visible symbols of affluence. It means consumer durables and credit cards and being rich enough to have a huge overdraft. How oh how is this going to change in the new order? In a sustainable, ecological future, the wealthy will be those who have the independence and the education to enhance the real quality of their lives. The poor will be those who look back to an age where money might – but never quite did – buy happiness. The wealthy will be those who live and work in friendly, mutually supportive communities. The poor will be those still trucking off to cities in crowded commuter trains to do jobs they can’t stand anyway. The wealthy will be those who make more of their own entertainment in a more convivial society. The poor will be twiddling the buttons on their cable-TV videos, trying to find the right brand of oblivion. The wealthy will be growing as much of their own food as they can, and growing it organically. The poor will be paying through the nose for an adulterated mess of pottage. The wealthy will be re-using and recycling and taking pride in how long things last and how easy they are to repair. The poor will be wondering when the novelty went out of novelty. The wealthy will be fully involved in their ‘parish or neighbourhood council, getting things done for themselves and for their community. The poor will still be blaming the government. Wealth in both its physical and its spiritual dimension will have regained its true meaning. ”

I WOULD like to give you an Aquarian analogy or approach to the new economics. When I was about eight, my parents took me on holiday to Jamaica, where we stayed in an extremely luxurious tourist resort called Ocho Rios, which means eight rivers. I was fascinated by the notion of eight rivers converging, and I kept pestering my father to take me to see them. Eventually he fobbed me off with some tourist guide, and we duly trucked off about 15 miles to the real village of Ocho Rios. As we got closer to the place where these eight rivers were supposed to converge, the guide got more and more apologetic. “It’s the summer,” he said. “All the rivers have dried up. They don’t all really exist any more; some
have gone underground. ”

When we arrived, there was one of the most tawdry and disgusting sights I have ever seen. A fairly large Jamaican woman was defecating copiously on the site where these eight rivers were said to converge, and all around her was the debris of the Coca-colonisation of Jamaican life. There was hardly any water to be seen anywhere. I must admit it was quite a difficult experience for me. “Is that it?” I asked the guide. “Yes,” he said. “That’s where the rivers used to flow together. ”

In the Ecology Party we talk a lot about the wasteland of contemporary economics. Now, it occurs to me that this model of eight rivers could be used to describe the various streams which could in fact be nourishing our society. Some of them are spiritual, others are pragmatic or political. But all of them have dried up or become dammed, so the potential sources of nourishment for our society are not contributing the wealth they could, and this is why we have a wasteland today.

The first of these rivers is what I would call the deist religions – those faiths which believe in a godhead of some kind. But people have for so long worried about which words to say over which stream according to which dogma, that the river has dried up and disappeared while they have been talking. The second river is that of the animist or pagan religions, those which believe we are in some way spiritually involved in the Earth and dependent on our relationship with her. To some extent, these have always been represented by small streams running through the mainland of contemporary society, but they have not always been pure – indeed, some have been very corrupt. The third river is that of the secular humanist tradition, one I would also classify as spiritual, in the sense of being a non-religious understanding of the spirit that is important for the maintenance of humankind.

In terms of pragmatic politics we have what I loosely refer to as conventional politics. Here we have the two rivers of left and right. The river of the left is basically drawing its water from an aquifer long since exhausted, while the river of the right has been privatised: you can only get to it now if you can pay to find your way to it – and then you have to pay for the water you take from it.

The sixth river is the apolitical one, consisting of a score of different movements such as the feminist, environmentalist and peace movements, which don’t operate in the conventional political world but which nonetheless have fed the mainstream of society in many different ways. Unfortunately, they have increasingly developed such vociferous tendencies to serve only their own interests that they have ceased to understand the need to irrigate the common ground of the whole of society.

The seventh river is that of business. Business has undoubtedly brought great wealth to society at different times, and has enormously benefitted people’s lifestyles and material living standards. Unfortunately, however, it has become obsessed with itself rather than with serving the needs of people, and to that extent the water flowing into society from the world of business has been severely polluted, often with our own waste products. The eighth river is that of technology, which has been dammed off for years – dammed literally by its obsession with large-scale technology and damned metaphorically by its obsession with nuclear technology.

The challenge facing the new economics, as I see it, is to free up these various rivers so they can once again flow to serve humankind. And things are, in fact, beginning to move. The deist tradition is now having to acknowledge, as in the liberation theology argued in South America, that the words of Christ are real political directives that those who claim to be Christians must follow through in their own lives. There is a greater awareness of the value of what the animist and pagan traditions have to offer. Conventional politics is shifting – even if only at the cosmetic level at present – as people begin to acknowledge the imperatives of a finite planet; while those people who operate apolitically are increasingly sharing a sense of their common ground. There are trends in business which indicate it is starting again to serve the needs of people rather than the needs of abstract imperatives such as profitability or productivity, while technology now has the potential to serve all these streams and make them possible by emphasising the small scale, the decentralised and the energy-efficient.

Everybody involved in the new economics is, I believe, in some way a prophet. We are putting forward a revolutionary set of ideas. What this requires from us is the willingness to get our hands dirty doing the things we claim to believe in, not standing apart and telling other people what to do. It requires us first and foremost to recognise that each of the rivers feeding our society is as valuable as the others, and that it is only by working together that we can make our Eatth flourish again for the benefit of all people.