Several years ago Prince Charles did a TV programme called "Killing Off The Planet" when he graphically showed how man in pursuit of wealth was disregarding the effects upon the earth. Of course man could never kill off the planet but what he can do is have a disastrous effect on life-supporting resources, largely due to disregard and destruction.
So the tasks facing all of us is just how we support ourselves without too much planetary destruction and just how we save the planet.
In the past the problem has largely manifest itself by looking at the environment and environmental care but the book aims to show that the true problem is economic and how we run economies, ever willing to depreciate natural resources for cash.
It has become so bad when man thinks that if he has problems he can simply throw money at them and they will be resolved. Well, saving the planet cannot be done by merely throwing money around: the earth is finite and money cannot replace spent resources, so in order to ease the problem a different route has to be taken and this involves a wholesale review of just how we create life supportive economies. We have to take the sting out of resource use and instead of maximising our use of the earth's resources we have to minimise use of resources when creating wealth.
We all need a degree of wealth but my book suggests that it can be achieved without wholesale pressure upon the earth to give up of itself but by careful planning we can build an economy with conservation in mind.
In order to improve our wealth and profit we need to reinforce the notion of creating high levels of disposable income which means better wages and a much higher proportion of wealth creation, wage costs being built into expense budgets. The trend over recent years has been to minimise wage costs. This really is not viable as it is only disposable income that creates the buy side of the market. If necessary, suppliers should increase prices or better still, save elsewhere on expenses.
In order to maintain a high standard of living it is necessary for the people to be able to buy at the better end of the market with the equality of finished goods coming up to match higher prices, goods aimed to be highly durable and long lasting whereby people own fewer but better goods. If goods can be designed to appreciate, so much the better.
Manufacturers need to go for higher prices and better mark-ups per unit on the strength of needing to sell fewer units to remain profitable. Higher profit margins per unit take the sting out of using resources in order to keep making and keep in business.
Human input is crucial to the success of an environmentally conscious economy. Since the start of work-study, manufacturers have been obsessed with seeing how much they can do using minimum labour. This is because humans are expensive as a cost in business.
But in reality humans are not really an expense to the world: they are a great capital asset. Nothing could happen without them. People may be individually expensive to business but in an overall context they are cheap to the world, using little resource to maintain life and in any conservationist context they are of greatest importance to use if we are going to minimise use of resources. Imagine a business with negligible human involvement and a high degree of machinery and computers. Such a business would be wealth creating but in fact doing little for the community at large, just a drain on resources. It is necessary to restore the view that business and economies should be for the benefit of the largest number of people, not people existing for the benefit of economies.
If we are to save, the planet we need to take the stress of use away from the finite earth, if we are going to maintain quality of life, otherwise we will simply use resources until they are no more, then wonder just how we are going to maintain life.
Saving the planet has to become a major part of our working agenda and it will take more than recycling, lifter protection and keeping the countryside nice. What is needed is a full-scale economic review.
Realistics is a new way of thinking, aimed at using natural influences that exist and adapting them to examine problems.
There are largely two natural influence factors that exist, positive and negative, what I call in my book relationship and anti-relationship, each opposed to the other and as a result of either there are consequences, the consequences being in the future. It starts off with either relationship or anti-relationship being of importance but when the consequences arrive they take over in order of importance.
Examples of relationship are the planets moving around the sun, the consequence being day and night; human relationship, the consequence being birth; the atom, the consequence being creation.
Examples of anti-relationship: atomic power, the consequence being a complete shattering of creation; war, the consequence being death and destruction, and more. For progress it is essential to minimise the negatives.
My book aims to point out that as a result of mathematical and economic thinking and its effect on reality, the consequence is anti-relationship and causing the notion of killing off the planet. And in order to resolve the issue takes some relationship thinking, in other words either wealth and reality have to relate, or anti-relate as little as possible. It is thought impossible that wealth and reality could relate overall without total appreciation, so it is felt that minimising anti-relationship is the best that we can hope for, hence the key issue of conservation
My book explains how to order the economy in such a way as to conserve as much as possible at the same time as providing some real meat to work with.
G S Glenny
