OPINION> Commentary
Row, row, row your boat, just sustainably
By John Coulter (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-02-19 07:46

The cartoon on the Opinion page of China Daily, February 10, of six rowers in a small boat on the high seas was used by the artist to support the notion that nations should pull together to solve the global financial crisis.

The small rowboat metaphor poses another stark question. Presumably these people have limited supplies in their boat - water, basic foods. So would they as individuals or collectively be urging higher consumption?

Well one cannot be exposed to media coverage of the financial crisis for five minutes now without some policy advisors or economic analyst recommending boosting consumption. And nations are doing it. In Australia, for example, families and pensioners were given free A$1,000 (4,372 yuan) for Christmas, and now again each worker, student and farmer will receive $950 from the government.

Many other countries are offering cheap loans or subsidizing consumer goods or salaries. This is to increase consumption and thereby register a fraction of a percent in GDP growth.That is how economists think.

Actually, the small crowded boat with limited supplies is a model of our Earth. Until now, we have always been able to find new frontiers and explore new territories for something good.

Our world seemed limitless. Our potential for improved wellbeing is limitless, but our resources are finite, with the exception of sunshine.

Only through new technologies to substitute for dwindling stocks (not supplies, but total stock) of petroleum, natural forest timbers, fertile soil etc can we grow.

Blind pursuit of a digit as a growth indicator is silly. The biggest beneficiaries of the Australian largesse were local gambling centers. Let us admit that money is only a symbol representing material things. The people trying to survive in the boat do not need money as a stimulus or as savings.

And there is another equally stark issue in a finite world. Production is really just throughput. What goes in also comes out, hopefully with some benefit to the consumer, and the molecular chemistry has changed. But there are exactly the same number of atoms and exactly the same weight. This is not a big problem for the men in the boat. They can dump their waste in the sea and no one complains. Their gaseous waste dissipates into the air. For the Earth this has become a problem. It is clearly already a localized problem. Solid and liquid wastes are dumped near to where they were generated. Big cities have to take care of about 15,000 tons of solid waste a day. Agricultural, domestic and industrial waste that runs into rivers, lakes and ground water is a huge problem exacerbated by growth in production and consumption.

In the past few decades, waste has become a global problem. Unlike the boat analogy, our Earth exists in a vacuum.

Trying to solve the waste problem by dumping in space is silly. Even burying such large volumes is becoming problematic.

The solution to solid waste and polluted water seems to be recycling, but it comes at a cost. Of course economists call this a productive service to be added to growth. This method of counting GDP is patently absurd.

If we understand the science and improve on it we can manage our industrial and domestic throughputs of solids and liquids. Waste gases clouding the sky now have global significance. We burnt 18 billion tons of fossil fuels last year and it all went up in smoke.

So thanks to China Daily cartoonist Pang Li, we are all in the same boat. And as that headline said, we do need collective action. But row intelligently, at the right pace. It would not be right to see how fast you can row, and how fast you can consume supplies. That would not be sustainable, would it?

The author is a Beijing-based independent Australian researcher collaborating with Tsinghua University and China Agricultural University.

(China Daily 02/19/2009 page9)