Message-ID: <3687F2C9.3F3A@solutions2000.net> Date: Mon, 28 Dec 1998 18:07:01 -0300 From: Gordon Forte <mailto:forteg@solutions2000.net> Subject: Re: eMergy and discomfort To: mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU
>I remember when there used to be a reason to read this list.
>Wilbur
>Wilbur
Wilbur Wilbur
Jay is indeed one of the reasons to read this list: let me try to explain, in my words, what his analysis has to do with this list.
I am a third-world subscriber who is interested in economic development. What Jay calls “economic-development-as-we-know-it” is not the same as reducing hunger, disease and grinding poverty in countries like mine. It is about providing a livelihood for first-world development practitioners. It is a bitter irony for people I identify and work with that their needs are defined, and projects mounted to meet them, in terms that bear little relation to their reality and their knowledge of their reality. This insulting exploitation is essential to the system of raising public funds in the name of poor people so as to provide ways to keep rich people rich, even while the cause of the poverty, misuse of global resources, is perpetuated by the way ALL the project funds are spent, not just the high percentage that finds its way back into first-world pockets individual and corporate.
When, therefore, we see someone like Wilbur attempt to shut someone like Jay up, we are reminded who always defines the terms and sets the bounds of discussion on “development”. It’s the economists and the development professionals, who make their living from poor people’s poverty. “The poor you have always with you” and precisely because their well-advertised condition provides employment to so many whose expensive education fits them for no productive activity. If it was only the fate of the poor that mattered, it would go on for ever.
But what Jay is saying to the development profession is that it can’t go on forever, because global resources, starting with oil, are finite. Supply can only respond to demand if resources are available to extract, transform and deliver goods. You can create value by inventing or redefining needs, (see also Wilbur’s remarks on microcash) but the cost of delivery is ultimately energy. The first world system isn’t sustainable on current solar energy, and it can’t go on using the world’s resources of stored energy, because they will be exhausted in the foreseeable future. For the first time we can all foresee that: that’s Jay’s message. The system must come to a halt, maybe even before Wilbur’s retirement. Unless, of course, the development professionals find a way to preserve their livelihoods: as always they will put a lot of effort into looking after their own interests, which have always had priority over the reality of the “beneficiaries” of “development”. Now their own interests, including their children’s welfare, are threatened by unsustainable resource use, but that is hard for them to admit because it’s more comfortable to go on talking about nuts-and bolts technology transfer with no limits.
Technology Transfer! For the whole world to be sustainable, it will need a reversal of the dominant models, including “to totally junk the present economic system”. This means economists and such who run the “Technology Transfer” development system must find new ways to make a living. We have seen enough of them to know they won’t do this voluntarily, at least on any time-scale that will make the necessary difference. But someone has to offer them the alternative, as Jay tries to do. When we see them try again to dictate the terms of the discussion, it is hard to be optimistic.
Gordon