Book Review

Solutions for a global crisis

Capitalism as if the World Matters

It is a sign of the times that An Inconvenient Truth, the film of Al Gore's lecture on climate change, was one of the best-attended American films of 2006. In it, Gore gives us all a clarion call: "The time for scientific debate [about climate change] is over - now is the time for action." Yet many still wonder if the science is really as clear-cut as Gore claims, and if so, what we should do about it. Some answers to both these questions are provided in three new books. They are written by Jonathon Porritt, formerly director of Friends of the Earth and probably Britain's best-known "green"; Seán McDonagh, for many years a missionary priest in the Philippines; and James Lovelock, the distinguished scientist. All three authors agree that the scientific evidence for man-made climate change is overwhelming, although their recommendations for action vary significantly.

Porritt's new book, Capitalism as if the World Matters, takes a different approach from his radical early work Seeing Green, and demonstrates his acceptance that capitalism is now the dominant economic system, and that green objectives can best be achieved by working with it. Copious footnotes are ample evidence of the research behind this book, which begins by examining "our unsustainable world", describing a range of ecological calamities such as water shortage and collapsing biological diversity. Porritt asks whether modern capitalism is "sustainable" because of its exclusion and alienation of growing sections of society. (This point was made by the Catholic economist Barbara Ward over 30 years ago in her pioneering but unfortunately now forgotten work on sustainable development.)

Capitalism as if the World Matters then offers "a framework for sustainable capitalism". Porritt's green credentials are unquestionable, and I was impressed by his obvious desire to try to reconcile the gulf between environmentalists and supporters of the capitalist model. Some scientists argue that there is increasing evidence for potentially catastrophic climate change. If they are right, political bridges are urgently required to bring about significant action to prevent it. Porritt advocates a new form of capitalism called the "five capitals framework", developed by his charity Forum for the Future. This includes the textbook definition of capital as financial or physical capital, but also includes "natural capital", essentially the biosphere in which we live, "human capital", including skills and health, and finally "social capital", the structures of human life in society. As he puts it: "The concept of capital serves not only to explain the productive power of capitalism; it also provides the clearest conditions for its sustainability." My main criticism of Porritt is his equation of Christianity only with those extreme fundamentalists who are close to President Bush.

In Fr McDonagh's previous books, such as The Greening of the Church, he tried to develop a solid theological grounding to assist the Church in becoming more actively involved in environmental issues. The first three-quarters of his latest book, Climate Change, provide a fairly thorough explanation of what global warming is, and why it matters. There is a good layman's explanation of the underlying science but too much unquestioning reliance upon sources such The Guardian.

The book also sets out the case for "peak oil", the term used to describe the problem that new global oil reserves are not being discovered fast enough to meet exploding demand in countries like China. Oil is unlikely to run out any time soon, but we will need to live with growing scarcity and rising oil prices.

McDonagh is violently against nuclear energy as a solution to global warming, citing numerous studies arguing against nuclear power; for him, it is ultimately a moral question: "I find it difficult to understand how Christians who believe that the earth was created and is sustained by God can support a form of energy that is inherently dangerous and will remain lethal for thousands of years."

What is most distinctive about Climate Change is its final chapter, "How the Churches have responded to global warming", which takes up the final quarter of the book.

McDonagh praises the World Council of Churches, which has "given the most courageous leadership of any Christian institution on a wide range of ecological issues, especially global warming". On the other hand, the book finds the Catholic Church wanting: "Catholic teaching on the same subject from the Papal Magisterium or Bishops' Conferences is pretty meagre." On a positive note it records some speeches by John Paul II on the environment, and argues that section 470 of The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church "can form the basis of a Catholic response to global warming and climate change".

James Lovelock developed the Gaia hypothesis in the 1960s: the idea that living organisms do not just react to the physical environment in a classic Darwinian sense, but that over time they can actually modify it. For example, life is based upon carbon, and over millions of years life forms have sucked carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, storing it in the ground in forms as diversified as chalk and coal. The Revenge of Gaia uses the Gaia model to address climate change. Its conclusions can be best summed up in the words of Dad's Army's Private Frazer: "We're doomed." According to Lovelock, now aged 86, runaway global warming, with its concomitant massive rise in sea levels, is inescapable. At best a small surviving fragment of humanity will survive around the poles: "Only a handful of the teeming billions now alive will survive. [Hence] It is much too late for sustainable development; what we need is a sustainable retreat."

Indeed, The Revenge of Gaia seemed to me to be an old man's book, overshadowed by gloom and the prospect of mortality. It reminded me of H.G. Wells' last book, Mind at the End of its Tether (1944), where the former apostle of progress is oppressed by the prospect of his own death, proclaiming, "there is no shape of things to come".

I do not share Lovelock's pessimism, and therefore commend Porritt for risking controversy by abandoning his former "green purity" for an attempt to work with capitalism rather than against it. McDonagh is to be praised too for his attempt to push the Catholic Church into engaging with the issue of climate change and, as revealed in The Tablet last week, the Vatican is indeed to hold a summit on global warming. This is in the tradition of encyclicals such as Rerum Novarum in 1891, which confronted the economic exploitation of the nineteenth century, and Mit Brennender Sorge, on the Church and the German Reich, which took on Nazism in 1937.

Back to homepage

       

The clear message that emerged from the symposium on child sexual abuse held in Rome from ...

According to the chairman of governors at the Cardinal Vaughan School, west London, one ...

There was an old Sixties TV series, Branded, about a disgraced soldier that always began ...