Topic: Environmental Response to Globalisation (Performance of Institutions)

Afternoon Session, Oct 13.

Mae-Wan Ho
First of all, I must say how honoured I am to be asked to moderate this session. Being a moderator means coming between extremes and this is not something which is familiar to me, I’m afraid, but also it’s because I am actually quite a naive biologist, so I don’t know very much about economics and I am here to learn.
But let me begin by telling you a little story, if you will indulge me. Something very significant is happening in my country. (When I say in my country, I do not mean China or Hong-Kong. I mean the United Kingdom, where I am permanently residing now.) There has been an unprecedented civil protest against genetic engineering biotechnology that cuts right across the social spectrum, literally from prince to pauper. This has happened within the past year. There have been debates, there have been demonstrations, peaceful actions in supermarkets, and even so-called decontamination of field-trial sites. There has also been legal action taken by ordinary citizens against the government for approving field-trials. Local councils have banned genetically engineered foods from school meals. Even our MPs have banned genetically engineered foods from their House of Commons canteen. One organisation after another, including statutory advisory bodies to the government, has come out to call for a moratorium.
Last Saturday, our government finally responded and came out in support of a three-year moratorium. They haven’t gone as far as to impose one yet. But this is the most heartening aspect and that is the underlying rejection that the status quo is inevitable. There is nothing inevitable or irreversible. Things can be different.
Genetic engineering biotechnology, for those of you who don’t know, is a prominent part of globalisation. As I said, a handful of corporations are poised to take control of all aspects of our lives. Not only that – they are engaged in a desperate, dangerous, gamble, which may ruin our food supply, destroy bio-diversity and unleash uncontrollable epidemics of infectious diseases.
But genetic engineering biotechnology reflects a deeper problem that we have to address. I am told that the philosopher Edmund Husserl, here in Prague in November 1925, announced the crisis of European science. It is actually a crisis of reductionist European science and big business, working in partnership, a partnership that has already brought us radioactive and toxic wastes, a hole in the ozone layer, environmental degradation and other legacies of the green revolution. Genetic engineering biotechnology is simply the latest offering.
This marriage has come to a kind of a climax because it is boosted by powerful mainstream academic theories. Neo-classical economic theory for business and neo-Darwinian genetic determinism – that genes determine what we are in a very simplistic way – that is the science. They have a shared mind-set, and we have heard about it already, they have a shared vision of the world as isolated atoms that can be manipulated one at a time. Glorified selfishness and greed, rampant competition and manipulation, exploitation, are the order of the day, because it is the survival of the fittest and the biggest. But nature is organically interconnected, and we not only have effects that spread far and wide, but these effects have a nasty habit of rebounding on us. That’s why the world is beset with environmental problems at the same time as the global economy is close to a collapse. Both theories have failed the reality tests. I do not have enough time to tell you, but genetic determinism has also failed the reality test within science itself.
Citizens of civil society in the UK and elsewhere are taking a last stand against this brave new world of bad science and big business. As Mr van den Broek said this morning, we need new departures from old trusted concepts and we are very privileged in this session to hear from some of the most original and powerful voices.
I have great pleasure to present to you our first speaker, Hazel Henderson, who I have heard about for 20 years, long before I got started in this business. So, please, Hazel, begin.


Hazel Henderson
Thank you so much. It’s an honour to meet you, Professor Ho, I have heard just as much about you. We have been having a little mutual admiration society, sitting next to each other.
Well, I’m not going to refer to my paper, which contains a lot of specific information on global and local environmental issues. I want to move on and pick up the very rich discussion we’ve been having today. This is a terrific note to start on: Professor Ho’s concept of bad science and big business.
For 20 years, I have been calling for going beyond an objective, value-free stance of science and calling for science with reverence: science with reverence for life, and reverence for nature. When I think of all of the issues that came up today – Mrs Clinton talking about the issue of media, this has been another of my crusades, because the media today is the only institution I know of on the planet that is totally out of control. I wrote, in my last book, about what was happening in the world as we were going toward government by media-cracy, a new form of politics. Not democracy – media-cracy. These are very, very important issues that I will pick up on in a moment. And then my friend, Amitai Etzioni, talking about global moral dialogues that are actually in progress. This has been my experience. I just came from Korea, giving a paper at Kyung Hee University, and their entire curriculum is to prepare people for global citizenship. Of course, it is still not taught in most of the universities in the world, but it was very inspiring for me to be part of such a rich conference where we had scholars from all over Asia and some from the US and Europe. How does one apply this idea of global citizenship?
Then I liked, very much, Professor Weiming Tu’s concept of public intellectuals because, during the time I served on the Office of Technology Assessment Advisory Council during the 1970s, I found so many intellectuals at the universities who were private people and would not come and testify before the Congress and said: “No, no, no, you know, I could not do that.” There was this tremendous timidity in the academic world.
Then, the discussion that we had, also, about the need to go beyond just votes and prices. While votes and prices are the two most important feedback that individuals can use to affect decisions in business and decisions in government, we all know now that votes must not be corrupted by money and campaign contributions; and we know that prices must be corrected with their full social and environmental costs.
So, this leads me to the last intervention – I guess it was Mr Utagawa, “taming the dinosaur” – and this has been very much my concern. He pointed out something that I also point out in my paper, and that is the impossibility of the three conflicting goals that nations have – where they want, at the same time, to open their capital markets, have a stable exchange rate, and domestic autonomy for their economic policies. This was pointed out in a paper in 1962 by two economists, Mandel and Fleming. This was also built on the experience of reports that led to the Bretton Woods meetings in 1944. Some of the economists from the League of Nations were presenting this impossibility that governments must deal with, so here we are at the end of the 20th Century and this has not yet been dealt with.
Then I was extremely encouraged by Professor Küng, telling us that he was going to talk to the heads of the stock exchanges and, yes, certainly, do propose the Tobin Tax, except I would say: do not attach Mr Tobin’s name to it, because that has been a sort of kiss of death. When I introduced this idea at the social summit in Copenhagen, the problem was that the amount of the tax was much too high and he talked about a 1 per cent tax. So it is much better, I believe, to call it a “currency exchange” tax, and it should be somewhat less than 1 per cent. I like to call it the Larry Summers tax, because our Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers did propose such a tax in a paper he wrote when he was an MIT professor in 1989. So, it’s much easier for all concerned to call it the “Larry Summers” tax. I would also say, to encourage you, that there are now 400 web sites devoted to currency exchange taxes and these are all grassroots civil society friends defending ecology, defending social safety nets. You would be very encouraged to know that even surveys have been taken in the USA and, actually, nobody likes speculators. So, it is perfectly okay to ask about currency speculation tax: it is quite popular among people. And then Professor Sunkel From Chile was so realistic and he was saying: “Good heavens, there’s nothing mysterious about this – it is economic policies, conscious policies that created these globalisations and powerful interests.”
To those that I try to challenge, I call it the Davos model, The World Economic Forum. When I was in Geneva a few months ago, on a conference about policing globalisation, we had Professor Klaus Schwab there and my old friend, Maurice Strong, who is co-chair of the World Economic Forum in Davos. I was saying: “Why do you suppose this audience (which was an audience of 500 legislators from around the world) are concerned with global environmental issues? Why are they attacking this Davos model?” Because this is the essence of cronyism, here is where the cronyism is – in Davos. The cronyism is in New York, and in Washington, when you see a long-term capital management company being baled out. I think that we do have to tell the truth about the situation we are in and this is why we cannot leave it to the finance ministers, because they cannot acknowledge why we took down all the fire-walls between all of the world’s economies. It was at the insistence of financial interest groups that this happened. And so, naturally, if you take down all of the fire-walls between all of the world’s economies, you have a global casino, or you have that truck that Prime Minister Biedenkopf was talking about, the truck out of control.
So, I am very encouraged with this meeting because we have a lot of truth telling, and I would urge you all to get a book from the World Bank, a copy of which I managed to get (it is in draft) and they tell you: “You must not show it to anybody”; so that is why I am telling you all about it. This book is called Beyond the Washington Consensus Institutions Matter, and what the World Bank means by “institutions” is “human capital”, the power of culture, rules at every level, family, community bonds. So, finally, after 50 years the World Bank is acknowledging everything that narrow economics leaves out. We are supposed to be talking, in this panel, about responses and so I am going to jump in and be very naive and talk about what we can do about all of this.
Of course, the first thing that we have to do is to correct national accounts, and this was already agreed to in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, so that we would bring in all of the social and environmental costs – we should count the human capital and the ecological capital and move toward quality of life – indicators, the real indicators of progress. I have been preparing my own quality-of-life indicators and, in the USA, it’s easier to do that with an asset management company than it is to do with the government. You will find this all on the web site of the company I advise. The web site is www.calvertgroup.com and we have 12 aspects of quality of life, and in a very short time we will have this on our web-site for editors of financial journals, etc. Of course, what we are talking about here is moving to sustainable, equitable forms of human development, and I hope you will all see the United Nations Human Development Report. I was one of the editorial advisers this year – it’s produced by the Oxford University Press. This year, we have taken up the subject of the evolution of consumption and we’ve talked about the over-consumption in OECD countries and under-consumption in other parts of the world.
Another thing we have to do is to shift our tax structures so that we tax not incomes and wages and payrolls, but waste and pollution and the overuse of natural resources. In Europe, this is now a very lively debate, and a debate is beginning in the USA. We need also to repeal all the subsidies that big corporations have managed to win from governments through big campaign contributions. These subsidies amount to about between US$ 750 billion and US$ one trillion a year. These are all subsidies to unsustainability: subsidies to fossil fuels; overuse of resources; and, so, if we want to move to sustainable development we do not need any more money. No government need worry about money because in Rio de Janeiro we were told that it would only cost US$ 650 billion to shift the world to a sustainable economic path. So, we will have money left over if we just stop governments from subsidising unsustainability. And then, I think, what we see happening now in OECD countries is the shift to what I call the “attention economy”, where time is now becoming more valuable than, or just as valuable as, money and in the US 28 per cent of Americans say they have reduced their incomes and moved to smaller towns in order to increase their quality of life.
It’s when people become overwhelmed with advertising messages: telling them what they should consume; who they should be; and people are saying: “I am not going to allow the outside world to tell me what my values are.” So, people are beginning to look inside for their values. As this shift happens, we can de-materialise GNP and move towards a more services-oriented economy, and many more people can have jobs in the services and human development sectors.
Another very important thing is going on, something that I talked to Professor Küng about, which is the Earth Charter. This came out of San Jose, Costa Rica, and it’s being moved by many hundreds of people all over the world, and it’s trying to get at this fundamental Earth ethic, if you will, to see if we can find some bedrock values to share.
The other kind of activities I think we can all support are: the move toward eco-labelling; the move toward organic gardening, which is becoming a very important sector now; and the fact that more and more people are protecting bio-diversity. There are so many things going on in civil society, and we all have to use the Internet. So, just a few more thoughts on the Internet and cyberspace. I wrote a poem about a month ago with the title, Cyberspace is Sacred Space. I will not read it to you now, but what we need to do is to move all of this discussion into the use of cyberspace.
At the moment we do have the lowest common denominator. “Economism” has taken over cyberspace, as we know, and what we are seeing is electronic commerce, electronic markets putting small local merchants out of business, because the electronic businesses are already lobbying their governments not to be taxed. And this is a big fight going on now in the United States. You can all see very clearly what will happen to governments if we have more and more business migrating into cyberspace and claiming that it should not be taxed. So this is another, very serious, set of issues.
I’ll jump now, so as to finish, to my latest editorial which I have some copies of, which just went out to the 400 newspapers that take my column, and it’s called Rules to Tame the Global Casino. These are very simple ideas. I think I have promoted the idea of a sort of “global securities and exchange commission”, the same as we had to do on Wall Street after the crash of 1929. The global market is now in the same kind of situation, and we need a global set of rules so that the Tobin Tax, or the Larry Summers tax, will simply be a part of that. But there are also a lot of very important other proposals. I’ll just mention two or three of them.
One is to have the Central Banks set up their own “foreign exchange currency trading”, which would be a non-profit public utility. This is not to say that the currency traders couldn’t have their own game in the money central banks, but just that the central bank is very foolish to play at the same casino table with speculators who are working on 100:1 margins. The central bankers have a different goal: they are supposed to protect the currency and protect their domestic economy. So, they should take as much responsibility for their currencies as they do for their sovereign bonds. So this proposal for a public utility, state-of-the-art screen-based foreign exchange system is very viable now and this would enable the taxing of currency exchange because you would have a computerised audit trail. It would also enable you to deal with currency speculation.
Another proposal I have been promoting for several years – and we have quite a few Nobel Prize Winners on-board with this one now – is a new partnership for peacekeeping. We call this the “United Nations Security Insurance Agency”, and this is simply a partnership between the Security Council, hopefully reformed with new countries being admitted and the veto removed, the insurance industry and civil society organisations that work all over the world on peacekeeping and conflict resolution in local communities. The idea is that any country that would want to cut its military budget would be able to buy an insurance policy, and the premiums would go into providing a permanent humanitarian force at the UN.
Last of all, let me just mention (this is an alternative to the kind of media we have today) the first global public access NGO television network, in 31 countries, which is a partnership between seven OECD aid agencies, private investors and NGOs. I can tell you more about this. I am working, at the moment, with them on a 26-week television programme called “The Ethical Marketplace” and, hopefully, we can get some of the ideas about reforming capitalism out into the media. Thank you.

Mae-Wan Ho
Thank you very much. You’ve given us a lot of rich ideas to think about. Now, I will pass over to Dr Moldan, who – among other things – has a very, very long list of important jobs that he is involved in, if I can find them now. He has been the director of the Charles University Environmental Centre since 1992, a full Professor of Environmental Sciences at Charles University and, as I say, if I were to read a full list of his qualifications, it would take the entire afternoon of this conference, so it’s my great pleasure to introduce Professor Moldan.

Bedřich Moldan
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, dear colleagues.
It’s really an extreme honour and joy for me to be able to speak to you today at this immensely important Forum. I must say that I am even more joyful because I am here to speak about the sustainability and environmental aspects of globalisation. I am extremely happy that this topic was given so prominent a place in the programme of the conference, because the sustainability aspect is an extremely important aspect of globalisation. In fact, globalisation has been very much criticised and I have heard just now from my colleagues here at the table some of the most important criticisms of globalisation from this point of view. Maybe I should try to raise a little more optimistic pitch on this issue.
My point is that what is often missing in all these deliberations is the focus on the link between the global and local perspectives. I think that here, for many purposes and many times, this is where the key to the solution of the issues lies; but we must bear in mind that there is not only this bipolar world of big global, on the one hand, and tiny local individual, on the other hand, but there is a whole range, a whole spectrum, of middle elements in between. I think that by focusing on them we may bring about a fruitful perspective. I would focus on three issues, which I think are very important aspects of the globalisation issue and which could be used as examples of what I have in mind when speaking about global-local links.
My first topic is: information and knowledge. Indeed, the blend between information and globalisation I deem to be one of the greatest assets, and perhaps the greatest asset, of our age. The enormous broadening of the cognitive perspective of the so-called “average citizen”; the vastly growing transparency of any dealings, anywhere in the world; the rapidly improving reliability of information – these are perhaps the main positive features of our global village, which is with us already. Especially from an environmental point of view, the scope and quality of instant and credible global information is truly fantastic and its positive impact is enormous. On the other hand, all too often the really important information that links the big CNN world to my own individual situation is still absent. What impact does the global crisis, of this or that kind, have on me? What should I do? And, on the other hand, does my own action have any impact on the state of the world? I believe that here we painfully lack the focus on the link, on the middle element, between these two extreme poles, but I believe there is some reason to be an optimist.
The hope lies in the growing institutionalisation of this middle element between the two poles by means of the many mechanisms of the “civil society”. I am very happy that we all have the opportunity to hear a lot of wonderful and eloquent expressions and speeches about the “civil society”. The most important of those elements of civil society that I have in mind could be a community in a very broad sense; or, more precisely, a community in several senses. I would not exclude from this category a parochial type of village community, or any community of physical neighbours; but communities of people linked together by factors other than geographical proximity may play a more important role. This is certainly nothing new. One can recall, for instance, the importance of the Benedictine community in shaping medieval Europe and, indeed, the whole of Western civilisation. But how can we distinguish between what we, in a positive sense, call “community” and what we call “special interest groups”? I think that it’s a very difficult distinction, in fact, and that in our contemporary globalised world we must be very careful to distinguish between these two notions and these two meanings. But, again, I am an optimist here and I think that we have already witnessed many positive actions of communities in a very positive sense.
For instance, there are many environmentally-conscious communities who are shaping, in more and more respects, the dealings of the contemporary world. Let me mention just one example, and this is the most criticised outcome of the recent Kyoto conference. People are certainly very right in saying that it is a very small step, even if in the right direction; and that much more is still needed; and it is not enough and not all people and not all countries are involved. All this criticism is certainly right. But I think that the Kyoto conference is definitely a breakthrough. We have witnessed the fact that the powerful group of nations, basically all nations of the developed world, have committed themselves to reduce “greenhouse gas” emissions by something like 5 per cent on average, and some of them by much more – like the European Union and my own country, of which I am very proud. I think that everyone must admit, and everybody certainly realises, that these commitments are not at all possible to be fulfilled without experiencing some pain. These are very difficult commitments and, if they are fulfilled – and I am perhaps a little naive but still a big optimist, but I believe that they will be fulfilled – it will mean rather drastic, and sometimes very costly, measures that will involve a voluntary limiting of consumption, and the stressing of many unpopular measures, within national economies. So I think that communities have played a big role in that and, if you have the opportunity to look in some detail at the dealings of the Kyoto conference, there were many, many lobbyist movements; but, these activities were not only of evil special interest groups, but also of good communities, and in the end, I believe, the good guys won. I think that this is one example of what I mean by communities and their role in shaping the contemporary globalising world. In fact, the present gathering of Forum 2000 should serve as a fine example of such a community which I believe could shape, to some extent, the contemporary world – even if our President did not say so in his opening speech, I hope it will help to shape it.
My second topic is: resource productivity and carrying capacity. Globally, easy communication, growing trade, free flows of energy, materials and capital, the effectiveness of the global factory and global supermarket, may enhance the productivity of the world’s resources and planetary carrying capacity. But, do these notions have any sense at the global level, if at local levels we witness just the opposite, almost without exception? We see a critical depletion of natural resources in many areas of the world. We see an enhanced stress on the channels that connect places of production and consumption. We see many other negative aspects of the strain on global natural resources, and I will not enumerate them because all of us know these issues. There is bitter controversy on this topic between “optimistic” economists and the sometimes called “pessimistic”, sometimes “realistic” ecologists. To my mind, the issue cannot be resolved without focusing on the middle link that should effectively connect and reconcile the two poles.
But what is this link? What institutions might represent it? I am afraid that in this case we are witnessing only the beginning of such institutions. Some of them were just mentioned by Professor Henderson and others. For instance, the tax system. I think that a total overhaul, a very intense reform of the tax system, could serve as an example of such an institution that would lead to the gradual internalising of the negative externalities of the contemporary globalising world, with enhancing trade and all the stresses on natural resources. But we must admit that in this respect these middle elements, the connecting link between global and local perspectives, is still totally missing. What we are talking about are more or less ideas and concepts, but definitely not real institutions that exist in our contemporary world. I think that this is one of the big challenges of our age, to devise such institutions to connect and reconcile these two very different and conflicting perspectives.
The third issue would be cultural and biological diversity. I am rather surprised that there has not been much talk so far, at this Forum, about these issues. But I think that it is one of the critical issues because we all know that diversity, both cultural and biological, is threatened by the globalising tendencies of our world. Again, the key to the solution may rest with the again rather neglected link between the global and the local. For bio-diversity, I propose to take – as a crucial middle element connecting the two opposing extremes – the landscape, its diversity, its land use at all levels. I think that the notion of landscape, the image of landscape, should serve as a very good paradigm for this connecting middle link between the local and the global perspective.
Landscape is where the details count, but at the same time you may see it from the perspective of a satellite picture. So, I think that if we could focus on landscape, and preserving its diversity, and preserving and conserving its richness, it could be a good guide. Conservation efforts and appropriate institutions, like land use planning, should be based on the landscape as a basic unit. In fact, the same may be true of cultural diversity, where some kind of cultural landscape, although probably not linked to any geographical notion, could be the clue. I think that here, again, we could focus on this – so far – missing link; but, perhaps in this case it is already developed to some extent, which could help us to reconcile these two conflicting perspectives, the big global and the tiny local. Thanks for your attention.

Mae-Wan Ho
Thank you for a very fine, thought-provoking talk. Now I shall open up the meeting to our panel discussion. May I call upon the first discussant, Tomáš Baťa, to give his contribution.

Thomas Bata
Madam Moderator, ladies and gentlemen, as a practitioner of globalisation, and after many years of work with regulatory institutions, I am very pleased to be able to comment on the progress of business globalisation, not only contributing to the increase of living standards, but also in respect of the improvement of its environmental responsibility.
Globalisation of business started a long time ago. There was enormous cross-continent Chinese trade millennia ago and, in more recent years, Marco Polo and Western trading ships discovered the world. In fact, being in Prague, I recently read that it was a Czech monk who brought tea-leaves from China to Darjeeling several centuries ago. In more recent centuries, crops and industrialisation developed. It was here that we first heard of regulatory institutions becoming active and controlling, for example, child labour and similar practices, later on culminating with the creation of the ILO. However, the real impact of ecology came with the population explosion, coupled with the introduction of new technologies and the realisation that, unlike trade in goods, the environment cannot be limited by national borders. By the time this was realised, much damage had already been done, both by private and state enterprises.
The real awakening, however, came through the Club of Rome, followed by the United Nations Conference in Stockholm and the later, very important, Conference in Rio. At that Conference, the private sector and the internationally operated organisations got together and created what might be almost called a bible of behaviour for international organisations in the changes towards globalisation. This document is called Changing Course, and it is a review from the perspective of global business on development and environment. I strongly recommend it as one of the documents many companies should purchase for their organisations. A host of NGOs were established as well as special interest groups. I mentioned particularly my family interest in the World Wildlife Fund, which made governments, business and the public aware of the challenge.
Governments, through the UN and various subdivisions of the OECD, created a number of “codes of ethics”. As I travel – selling shoes, creating employment – I can see the wave of understanding of the importance of the environment spreading even to remote areas of the world and the pride being taken in the elimination of these problems. This needs to be accelerated. However, let me make it clear that the importance of world standards needs not only the will and the desire but also the resources with which to accomplish this. These resources will come primarily from some forms of constructive human activity – be it agriculture, or the constructive, conservative and responsible conversion of natural resources, industry and commerce, and many other types of activity.
As we hear, globalisation affects ideologies and the behaviour of societies and institutions. Globalisation and liberalisation have great merits, but they also create a variety of challenges. Like industrialisation in its early age, globalisation produces progress and great benefits, but also “imbalances”. No one country can govern, however great its political and military power. The openings of markets and competition have to be accompanied by re-affirmed co-operation between states. That means a creation of units – like we have the European Union, we have the North American Free Trade Area and many other similar organisations coming into force, each of which is able to be strong enough to administer the various required operations.
The opening of borders for the movement of goods and services, as well as new entrepreneurial thinking on the part of business people and governments, permit efficient utilisation of the fruits of research and innovation. The success is the result of balance between adventuring and regulatory restraint. When this balance exists, prosperity continues. However, when it ceases to exist, very serious problems can occur, as we, of course, all know from the recent developments in the Far East, which affects other parts of the world as well. Thus for business, internationalised regulatory institutions, co-operation – and co-operation of a flexible character – needs to exists. These types of conferences, and also the forthcoming OECD meeting on updating of the codes of conduct of multi-national enterprises, will help to cerate that balance and assure progress. Thank you very much.

Mae-Wan Ho
Now, may I present Professor Dr Hans Küng from Switzerland?

Hans Küng
Thank you, Mrs Chairman, Mr President, ladies and gentlemen.
Let me go immediately to the heart of the matter. My main thesis is very simple. Globalisation calls for a “global ethic” – that seems to be self-evident. Globalisation calls for a “global ethic”. You all know the background, that globalisation, of course, brought us also the globalisation of problems, of problems in all fields, problems from the financial and labour markets to ecology, and let’s not forget organised crime. Everything is globalised. If there are to be global solutions, this therefore calls also for a globalisation of ethics. Globalisation of ethics does not mean a uniform ethical system. As a matter of fact I prefer, in English, the word “ethic” to the word “ethics”, which is more the doctrine and the system, I believe in “ethic” in the sense of the inner conviction of the human being but, of course, it needs special general common standards, not a uniform ethical system but a necessary minimum of shared ethical values, basic attitudes and standards, to which all regions, nations and interest groups can commit themselves. In other words, there is a need for a common basic human ethic, and there can be no “new world order” without a “new world ethic”.
If I speak about a “new world ethic”, that does not mean that we have to invent it because there is enough, in the resources of humanity, of several thousand years of ethical and religious traditions, where we can find these things. So, that is my position in principle.
Now let me come to a special problem, here with regard to ecology. As Professor Moldan just said, he is hoping that these promises will be fulfilled. Now, I talked to one of your compatriots yesterday evening here – a young lady – and she said: “What is most impressive is that we know what we should do, and we now have all these international conferences, and I think Hazel Henderson gave us a great overview about everything that is going on, but the ‘implementation’ is the problem.” Now the “implementation” is a problem not only because, as some people think, we do not have the specific political structures. I think the main problem is that we have not just a lack of political structures, but we have a lack especially of ethical and political will. Just to mention the tax on speculative money. Not very sure of what is possible in economics, a few months ago I asked in Delhi Robert McNamara whether, as former President of the World Bank, he thought it would be possible to have this kind of Tobin tax, as I still call it. He said: “Well, it is possible if you want to have it.” Now, that is the whole problem: you have to want it. You mentioned that you need a great deal of things – you leaders – we need probably also what we had, as a matter of fact, in 1948 – great confidence – when we had a new financial order. Keynes was, as a matter of fact, the great theorist behind the new order. Now we do not have, I think, a common economics, and we do not have a great scholar who could be the leader in theory.
There is also a certain lack of leadership at the world level, especially for introducing a new kind of control of these finance streams, with billions and billion of dollars going around the world all the time. But you see that is why I am so interested in the problem of motivation, which I think has not really been resolved, even in “sustainable development” theory. I think a theorist of “sustainable development” would agree that it is very, very difficult to prove, so to speak by pure reason, that this has to be done. To put it in a simple way, why should things not be worse for the generation after us, if that is the way things are going? Why should things go even better for them, as is sometimes desired? I think it’s very difficult to give really scientific reasons providing, so to speak, a quasi-automatic logic that would compel you to have a policy of sustainability that would have to be practised necessarily.
You all know that the social sciences can clarify and interpret the process of selection that is necessary here, as is shown by the impressive preparatory documents of the UN summits. But, and this is unfortunately shown by the ultimately disappointing results of this summit, the results themselves must be arrived at ethically and politically. In a sentence, sustainability is neither a purely economic concept, nor a purely ecological concept.
It is not even a purely scientific concept, but it is basically an ethical demand. It depends absolutely and utterly on our ethical motivation whether we decide that things should go as well for the generation of our children as they do for us, or worse, or better. The question as to whether I should concern myself, here and now, with the fate of future generations, I do not know the answer: it can hardly be decided by pure reason. I could say: Don’t I already have sufficient anxieties? Couldn’t I be quite indifferent about what happens to later generations? And many people tell us today: Why should I worry about the devastated landscapes elsewhere? What is the problem with the disappearance of a species, as long as my garden blossoms and my dog remains alive? Why worry about the changes in the climate, which will make the oceans rise only in the year 2000 and after? Why shouldn’t I think that the main thing is for me to live well, and to do what gives me pleasure? This is completely in accord with today’s psychological and therapeutic correctness.
Everything depends on one’s own fulfilment and self-realisation. Political and social involvement is put on the front pages of our newspapers and on the last page you read: “Do what you want and have your fling.” It is, in fact, a deeply ethical basic decision as to whether I think at all about the fate, not only of our children but of future generations generally – not to mention whether I work so that things go better for future generations than for mine, or at least no worse. Ethics, or ethic, is more than rated-up interest in this specific instance. Ethics aims at a commitment to others, which is both unconditional and universal and, of course, even divergent interests, and the pressure of facts, must be reflected on critically for ethics to be had without conflicts.
Ethical decisions are often subject to great tensions, especially if they are governed by deep religious convictions. Therefore, I also have to say a word about religions. It would be very easy to say: “Well, by pure reason you cannot prove it, but you can do it by religion.” Unfortunately, it became obvious at the UN World Population Conference in Cairo that the greatest danger ever posed to worldwide survival of the human race is excessive population growth, above all in poorer countries; but, unfortunately, fundamentalists of Christian and Islamic provenance irresponsibly did all they could, in Cairo, to establish their own sexual morality and to give free rein to the uncontrolled development of the population. I do not want to insist on that. I would only say: “Well, obviously, not only pure reason but also pure religion is not competent do that.” So, on what basic conditions can we survive as human beings on a habitable earth, and give our individual and social life a human form? Certainly an anthropocentric conception, in the traditional and exclusive sense, which ignores the suffering of animals and plants, and neglects the environment, should be discarded. That is not what we need. But a bio-centric conception, which wants to attribute the right to exist not only to plants and to animals but also to ecological systems and biological species, seems little suited to give help, in a practical sense, as a holistic conception, which also wants to protect inanimate nature for its own sake.
If everything is worth protecting, there are no criteria that can justify interventions in nature. Therefore, what we need is an integral humane conception: humanity, in a cosmic context, as it has been emphasised from of old, more in the Indian and Chinese spirituality than in the Christian West. Instead of the exploitative domination of nature by human beings, we need an incorporation of human beings into nature.
The fundamental goal and criterion of ethical action in the global economy, and global ecology, has to be the human being in the midst of an environment worth living in. No matter what economic and ecological projects are planned for a better future, the basic ethical principle must be that human beings may never be made “mere means”. They must remain the ultimate aim, always the goal and criterion. Money and capital are “means”, as work is a “means”. Any assessment of the consequences of technology has to note that science, technology and industry are “means”. They, too, are in no way intrinsically value-free neutral, as we have heard; rather, in each individual instance they should be judged, and used, in terms of how far they help human beings as individuals and as a genre to develop in an environment worth living in.
Today it is easy to agree about this in theory. The problem is how to realise it in practice. Everyone wants, but no one does anything, we often hear. There is a great awareness of the environment, but little action that takes into account the environment. So, coming back to the problem of motivation, with specific rules a rational ethic can command quite specific attitudes and lifestyles, self-control, a capacity for peace, fair distribution, and the furtherance of life. It can also offer particular rules of priority and safety for estimating benefits when rating up the consequences of technology, rules for solving problems, rules for the burden of proof, rules for the common good, rules for urgency, for ecology, for reversibility. All these rules offer pointers, thoughts, discriminating rational action, but they do not give an answer to the question of moral motivation.
This question arises, particularly acutely, in connection with long-term responsibility for coming generations and for nature. Under these circumstances, the question becomes acute, as to where is it we get the motivation from for an ethic of the future, for long-term responsibility towards later generations, for long-term responsibility towards nature. Such a motivation presupposes, first of all, a change of consciousness.
The important thing is to develop an awareness of one’s own chronological position in the chain of generations, and to develop a feeling of community, which goes beyond the generation, if not with the whole of humanity, at least with the limited cultural, national and regional group. For such a change of consciousness, it is possible to gain a twofold attitude, namely a retrospective attitude of gratitude and the recognition of one’s own responsibility to bake provisions for the future.
So you see I have to come to the end here. I think religions, even if they have their limits, can really give you some help in order to evaluate this connection of generations, because there is no other institution in this world that has such a feeling, and such a sensitivity, that we are living in a long history of several thousand years, of very many generations, and one generation after the other. So, in the parliament of the world’s religions, where we had the first declaration towards a global ethic, I will end by quoting this passage, precisely on ecology, where the parliament said in Chicago in 1993: “A human person is infinitely precious and must be unconditionally protected. But likewise, the lives of animals and plants, which inhabit this planet with us, deserve protection, preservation and care. Limitless exploitation of the natural foundations of life, ruthless destruction of the biosphere and the militarisation of the cosmos are all outrageous. As human beings, we have a special responsibility, especially with a view to future generations, for the earth and the cosmos, for the air, water and soil. We are all intertwined together in this cosmos, and we are all dependent on each other. Each one of us depends on the welfare of all. Therefore, the dominance of humanity over nature and the cosmos must not be encouraged. Instead, we must cultivate living in harmony with nature and cosmos.” Thank you.

Mae-Wan Ho
Thank you, Professor Küng. I am sorry I had to rush you with such a very beautiful presentation. May I call upon Professor Sunkel to give us the third contribution?

Osvaldo Sunkel
Madam Chairman, I really feel that I should be very brief, because the organisers of this conference have given me a lot of time this morning. I will also try to say some kind things about economics after having been very critical this morning.
Economics may, after all, become a useful, a positive, element in the defence of nature. The definition of economics that everybody, more or less, accepts was coined by Lionel Robbins, in 1932 or so. It speaks about economics being concerned with “scarce means” that can be used to supply a great variety of ends. “Scarce means” at that time, 50 or 60 years ago, referred basically to capital, to technology. Seventy years later, nature has become a “scarce means”. Natural nature has almost disappeared. We have artificial nature, but natural nature is becoming increasingly scarce, and as it is becoming increasingly scarce, it is becoming an economic good. In order to have fresh water, we have to buy it, we have to pay for it; in order to have clean air, we have to buy it, we need air-conditioning; in order to be able to travel through a city, we spend a lot of time and expense, and we need a helicopter now to get from one place to another.
Nature has become scarce. It has become increasingly scarce and, therefore, it is becoming an economic good and, therefore, business is becoming interested in investing in nature, in providing those goods that are increasingly scarce. It is very interesting that it is precisely that part of business that is frequently most castigated, most criticised – transnational corporations – that are becoming more susceptible, more willing to do something in nature’s favour. Why? Because multinational corporations have a very long-time horizon and the world is their market. They are very different from small and medium-sized enterprises, which have a short-term horizon and a very limited market. So it is very interesting, for instance, to find that the chairmen of British Petroleum and Shell are some of the people who have reacted most positively to the need to do something about global warming.
We’ve just heard from a very distinguished entrepreneur, Tomáš Baťa, about the way in which the International Business Council for Sustainable Development has been developing positive attitudes towards the environment. Unfortunately, many of the environmental goods and services are public goods or are externalities and, therefore, they don’t appear in the market: the market doesn’t price them. So, it is a role that government has to fulfil and here we have another role. Why do we have to bring the government back in – to help either create markets where they don’t exist, or estimate values for those goods that don’t have a market? There is a whole new development in economic theory about how to develop indicators of sustainability, about how to value goods and services that are not valued in the market and how to value the disappearance of resources that are being exhausted, and so on.
After all, economics may make an important contribution to saving the environment at this last hour. Neo-classical economics itself has developed two fields of interest: one is the economics of pollution; the other one is the economics of natural resources; and a third strand, which is sometimes called ecological economics, is developing extremely fast and dealing basically with questions of sustainability.
If I may be allowed to end with a commercial, on 15-19 of November in Santiago de Chile we are having a very important international conference on policies and institutions for sustainability, where these matters are going to be discussed and I hope that all of you will visit us in Santiago. Thank you very much.

Mae-Wan Ho
Thank you very much. May I now call upon the last panellist – and with great pleasure because this is a student participant, Mr Petr Lebeda. He is a Students’ Forum 2000 delegate from the Czech Republic. May I call upon him to speak now?

Petr Lebeda
Thank you Mrs Chairman.
Distinguished colleagues, ladies and gentlemen, it’s a great honour for me to sit among you and listen to your elaborate thoughts, and to be able to experience the way you think, and work, upon such difficult topics as globalisation. However, as it is the end of the panel, I’ll try to be very brief as many people really need the break already, including me.
What I want to talk about is something as simple, but as essential, as “pain”. Why? Today’s theme is the economic dimension of globalisation. As a matter of fact, ecology and economics are very closely interrelated. That is why I think the organisers put both of the themes on today’s agenda. After all, they come from the same Latin word. There has always been a question among the specialists among you as to whether the ecology or the economy should be the first and the main thing, the chicken or the egg.
I am really happy that there finally seems to be a dialogue between economics and ecology. Corporate people are more and more aware of environmental limits, and environmentalists think of how to include all the external costs to the economic system and how to set the economic system so that it works in favour of the environment. This is great, but I don’t think it’s enough. We may be inclined to believe that this compromise is workable. However, I think that more profound change is needed and that’s what my student colleague already called for, a new economic paradigm.
To come back to my key word, “pain”. The idea of “pain” came to my mind sitting in St Vitus Cathedral and being a participant in the multi-religious assembly. I think it’s a great idea that we have so many different religious people here and it was actually Father Malý who said that religion is not basically designed to bring people happiness, but to make them feel “pain”. I think that this is something very clever and very wise. It is also very much connected to what we are speaking about here. It has struck me many times, when I have been able to travel to the West, that the modern capitalist economic system is sweeping away the “pain” from the lives of common people, and I think this is not a good thing because what the “pain” teaches us is sensitivity, modesty and also a respect for what transcends us. Therefore, it provides us with a necessary feedback, which is a key thing for sustainable life.
I just want to draw your attention to this simple, but essential, thing because I have the feeling that the discussion at the grand Forum is a bit too general. It is a bit too theoretical and maybe too technical as well, and we need to go back to something basic, something spiritual or religious, to bring the real-life dimension, as I call it, amongst the economists and the politicians. It’s also one of the aims that we will try to discuss, and further elaborate, at the Students’ Forum, which will hopefully be enabled in future years. Marek Jacina has just submitted a proposal for the Students’ Forum to Mr Sasakawa. Let’s hope we will be able to invite you all and discuss these things again.
To conclude, I think that the problem of globalisation, which have been talked about here, is so complex, so dynamic and so ambiguous, that it’s simply impossible to resolve it rationally. I think that what we need is a rational momentum. Everyone, including the media, is calling for a simple, clear and feasible solution, but there is no such thing if we grasp the problems rationally. So I just want to draw your attention to the rational moments and to the emotional moments, and I am glad that the distinguished guests from Japan and from the Southern countries came and gave us an idea of what it could be. Thank you.

Mae-Wan Ho
Thank you for that most valuable contribution. Remember “pain” and sensitivity. Thank you.

Coffee break

Mae-Wan Ho
We’ll have almost an hour of discussion, of a very exciting session like that we have just had. It was very, very stimulating. I have on my list two people among the panel who want to make a contribution at the moment. But, I will open up the floor, and I will use my prerogative, as a moderator, to throw in some extra elements to the excellent contributions that have been made.
My first concern, as far as how to implement all these excellent suggestions like global ethics and ecological and health concerns, is not to let trade override these ecological, ethical and health considerations. Some of you may know that there are trade and investment treaties being negotiated at the World Trade Organisation on multilateral agreements on investment; which, together with the standards set at the World Health Organisation on what constitutes safe and unsafe, may well undermine our environmental and ethical concerns. There is now a big coalition of people in the UK and elsewhere, who are going to bring a group of farmers from the South, a lot of them from India, and they are going to tour Europe. They are going to have a lot of actions at these financial institutions, and other meetings, to remind them that people are the ends and not the means. I am very optimistic that what is ethical and ecological is also healthy, is also good for us. Not only good for our souls, but also physically good for us. The prime example is, of course, organic sustainable agriculture because a lot of our illnesses are caused by agro-chemicals. This is now very much the wisdom that is coming back all over Europe.
The other thing I would like to say is that I know there are now green assessments for corporations. How can we have ethical assessments for corporate behaviour? For instance, if we think that people are the ends and not the means, must we ask how many people do they actually employ? My good friend, David Gordon, has just written a book from which I learned that the top 200 corporations in the world are actually responsible for employing 0.3 per cent of the people all over the world.
The third point I picked up from our last panellist. He suggests that maybe we need new economic models. Is it possible to have economic models (of course I know it is possible because it has already been suggested by people like Jeremy Rifkin among others) that are not based on growth. If you think in terms of an organism, if we think in terms of a sustainable system as an organism, then we know that organisms do not grow continuously like that. They have a period of growth and then they mature. They reach a kind of steady state, and then they grow old only slowly. I think maybe we should think about that as well.
Now, may I call upon Mr Sükösd, who is first, to make his contribution?

Miklós Sükösd
Thank you very much, Madam Chairperson. I’d like to ask two questions: one about the economy, ecology crosscuts, that was elaborated by Hazel Henderson and my neighbour Osvaldo Sunkel, and then by yourself; the other is about the question of ecological optimism represented by the other keynote speaker this afternoon, Professor Moldan.
About the first question. I’d like to pose this question about the economic value of natural support systems. How can we calculate them? Are there any ways of innovative calculation or innovative assessment? What I have in mind is the following: nature provides raw materials, medicines, tourist values, food, that have direct economic value. Instead of nature, we can use other terms, such as habitat, bio-diversity, different species, different genetic variations. All these give us direct economic value. They perform direct services to humanity, to human economic systems. Different species transfer solar energy to natural food chains; they keep the air clean and produce oxygen that we all use; they modify climatic extremes; they maintain the composition of the atmosphere; they absorb waste and pollutants; they recycle nutrition; they create soil; they control diseases; regulate water cycles, and so on. How can we take into consideration these undeniably crucial inputs into human products?
Now, bringing down this theoretical argument to Earth, when we sit in a car and travel somewhere, we use internal combustion engines. We take one crucial ingredient for granted: that’s oxygen. In the price of cars or gasoline, it is not taken into account. Traditional economics, as Dr Sunkel pointed out, do not care about these naturally given free goods. So my question, to Hazel Henderson and to other members of the panel, is about this – innovative approaches, new concepts, new ideas, about how we can take into consideration these hitherto unrecognised values, which have been neglected, which have been taken for granted as a free lunch.
The second question goes to Professor Moldan and the optimistic scenario he outlined. In his classification I would probably count as a pessimist, although I am not an ecologist or a natural scientist: I am just a concerned citizen. I couldn’t agree more with Hans Küng’s contribution, when he talked about the ethical dimension of sustainability. In his paper he said that it’s mostly an ethical question and all the rest – the economic, the ecological and technical issues – come after that. In the paper I prepared for the conference, I called for the same approach to inter-generational solidarity, or the “inter-generational love test”, which means that we should leave the Earth in the same way, or in a better way, than we inherited it.
It’s a pretty personal and emotional issue to me because I happen to have a one-year-old son and, whenever I look at him, the same kind of ethical question, or the parent-child love test, comes to my mind, and when I employ this inter-generational love test I don’t think that the balance is very good. I see all the negative influences on the local or personal level.
I am from Budapest and, when I was a child, I was able to swim in the river Danube, where the beautiful Danube bends, and to spend summers in the sun. My son cannot go to the water any more, because 30 years later the Danube has turned into a sewer of industrial and human waste. The majority of Budapest’s waste – the city has about 2 million people – goes to the Danube without any kind of chemical, biological, or even mechanical filtration. He cannot go out in the sun because of the ozone layer depletion. He can spend maybe an hour early in the morning, and an hour in the late afternoon because of the danger of skin cancer. I am not able to pass the inter-generational solidarity test. I am not able to leave the Earth in a better, or the same, position to my son or to my students. But this is just a personal level.
There is the global. I would like to remind you all of the speech given by Professor Joshua Lederberg here at the conference last year, which was the most dramatic lecture for me. He is a Nobel laureate geneticist, medical researcher and virologist, who is interested in communicative diseases. He called attention to one unintended consequence of globalisation, namely, our exposure to new virus infections and bacterial infections, the way globalisation and the massive movement of people makes us vulnerable to new diseases. He mentioned that more than one million people cross national borders by air travel alone – daily – more than one million people. All the rest who travel by bus, cars, ship and train are in on top of this. War migrants who escape from their countries are additional to this. If we take into consideration population growth: there are nearly six billion of us on the Earth now; in a few years we will reach seven billion; and, the growth will probably continue exponentially. We asked the question to Mr Singh, former population minister of India, about the mid-term and long-term prospects. He, with the best of his knowledge, couldn’t give us an answer to this. So, I’d like to turn back to you, respected panellists, with this question of long-term forecast.
I have learned a great deal from your information, knowledge and wisdom on this panel, from every panellist, including the moderator herself. Now I would like to ask you to consider everything in your professional careers and your personal ethical convictions: How would you evaluate humankind’s prospects in the mid-term and in the long run? I know that it is not easy to confess whether one is a pessimist, because as activists we need to show ourselves as role models and to offer hope. So, taking this into consideration, and knowing this is a very hard request, I would like to appeal to your deep conviction and ask you to kindly give long-term forecasts.

Mae-Wan Ho
Shall we take several questions before the panellists respond or would you like to? Is it directly following? All right.

Hans Küng
One sentence. When you talked about the Danube in your city, it came to my mind about the Thames in London. There is a famous story about the destroyed river and there is a famous story about the return of fish back to the river. That’s all I wanted to say. There is always the possibility.

Mae-Wan Ho
Thank you. I must now give the floor to Mr Mehmet Aydin.

Mehmet Aydin
Thank you very much. Your last comments also proved that a common theme is going through all our discussions, this morning and this afternoon, that is: the moral dimension of the whole. We talked in the morning about the relationship, which is very weak indeed, between our economic life and our moral life. In the afternoon, we also talked about the lack of sensitivity towards, even responsibility for, nature and our environment. I think, not here but elsewhere, two types of discourse are going on. For example, when talking about economic life, we usually use the terms “rationality”, “globalisation” and so on and so forth. But, when we come to our discourse concerning moral experience, we usually talk about “localisation”, “relativisation” and even trivialisation, which is quite post-modern, whereas the former speech, the former discourse is quite modernistic. So, in a sense, there is not a clash, but some difficulties between these two types of discourse. Perhaps within this context, Professor Küng referred to his well-formulated global ethic because he is really trying to make that concept as clear as possible to us, to the world.
I would like to take a step forward, in a way, and refer to something deeply philosophical. I believe that all this is somewhat related, directly or indirectly, but I believe more directly, to our system of education, to the predominant system of education. It relies directly on our concept of rationality, on our concept of epistemology, which is still going. This modern epistemology, as many philosophers noticed, prevents us from cultivating moral intellect, of which our friend talked in the morning. So in order to cultivate our moral intellect or, if you like, our aesthetic intellect, and our religious intellect (I believe that religion is also something intellectual; religion has a cognitive dimension, so it’s not all emotional, it is also cognitive in a very serious sense), in order to cultivate all these different capacities, I think we have to work on a different concept of epistemology, a concept which is in the air but which has not been worked out enough. This is a fairly new epistemological framework, which is usually called “relational epistemology”. It comes from the idea that everything is connected with everything else in the world, on the planet; so, this epistemology can also be called “experimental epistemology” – it goes through our experience.
When this epistemological framework or structure is fully developed, I believe it is quite possible to give due respect to humankind’s cognitive, religious, aesthetic and moral experiences, all of which constitute the whole human person. Thank you.

Mae-Wan Ho
Thank you. Now I have Hazel, and I have the gentlemen next to Mr Aydin and also, yes Weiming Tu. Now can I get a sense of whether there are people wanting to contribute from the audience? Our main speakers on the panel will respond and then we’ll carry on.

Hazel Henderson
Yes, to my friend from Budapest. First of all, I would like to just make a reference to motivation, a question that Professor Küng raised. All I can speak from is my own experience. I do not need any other motivation than the one I began with. I am a mother and I began worrying about my child’s health, just like my friend from Budapest. Now I am a grandmother, and I have an eight-year-old who has deep conversations with me about endangered species – an eight-year-old. So, what further motivation does anyone want, than being a parent or a grandparent? I don’t get it, I just don’t get. So, let me start there.
Yes, I really agree very much with the last speaker, that it is an epistemological problem and a paradigm problem. To relate this back to economics, one of the points I make in my paper is that neo-classical economics takes us in precisely the wrong direction, because it uses the idea of a law of large numbers in determining the behaviour of consumers and producers in the marketplace. The result of that particular statistical paradigm is that we are all powerless. That is why I like the work of my biology friends, who are resuscitating the early work and some of the writings of Charles Darwin, and the whole concept of the evolution of moral sentiments. Of course, even that goes back to one of Adam Smith’s books, so I began to worry about these free-goods and free-rider problems many, many years ago.
For me, it began with the first law of ecology, which is that everything is connected to everything else, so I do believe that that’s a proper place to start. I don’t know how much further we can take pure economics, but I think it can be taken a lot further. For example, the work that I do now in quality-of-life indicators: there are companies now which do ethical audits of your corporation, so there are ways that you can play judo with the market place. One of the ways, as I mentioned before, is the TV series that I am doing on the ethical marketplace, which will be in 31 countries and I hope, by the end of next year, we will be in 60 countries. I hope we will be on all of the Reuters screens and the Bloomberg screens and it will look like a perfectly ordinary financial show, except we will be talking about ethical investing, eco-labels, ethical auditing, environmental auditing, all of these kinds of issues. The whole idea is to move this debate along.
Regarding the approach to ecological assets, we have to go beyond the current ecological economists’ formula, because they’ve promoted the idea of “willingness to pay” and it’s a very faulty methodology. The only way you can really value ecological assets is at replacement cost. That stretches out the time horizon in the proper way. I’ve been doing some work in Brazil – and now the Brazilian government, and the private sector in Brazil, are holding a whole series of meetings this autumn on pricing Brazil’s ecological assets. The Brazilian government made a great contribution in Kyoto with the clean development mechanism, because where we need to go is: how do you create a clean green ethical economy that can employ everybody? There is enough real work in the world to employ every human being who wants to work. Thank you.

Bedřich Moldan
Just a few words, three points to our Hungarian colleague. First I think that you started with a very powerful parallel and argument for being an optimist when you yourself quoted your son. So, what else is it than an extreme sense of inter-generational responsibility. I think that I am not the only optimist in this room.
Speaking about the environmental issues, just by chance you started with two issues which definitely have very good prospects. The ozone layer is something which could be seen as the first example of an environmental success story in an international context. The Ozone Treaty was the first conducted and agreed upon, and I think that there is a very good prospect that all the conditions the scientists have raised will be fulfilled, and that the ozone layer will recover after a while. A while is something like thirty years, of course. But the prospect is here.
The last thing, just a little remark on ecological or environmental economics. Hazel Henderson said that the method of “willingness to pay” is a wrong one, but there are a host of methods, inter alia also this one, which have enabled economists, under the leadership of Robert Costanza, to calculate the economic value of the different environmental services provided by nature to mankind. The work was published in last year’s Nature and it is a rather famous paper. It was something, if I am not mistaken, like tens of trillions of dollars. Certainly, there was a lot of criticism. I am not saying that this is just the ultimate wisdom, but it sparked a very rich discussion in the Journal of Ecological Economics during the end of last year and this year, and if you would study these articles in reaction to that, and to the criticism of that, I think that you would see that it marked a significant step in the right direction in economic theory. Thank you.

Mae-Wan Ho
Thank you. I think I will now call on Mr Shariff Abdullah.

Shariff M. Abdullah
I wanted to thank the organisers of the conference for making sure that we had student input at each one of the sessions. I want to thank you Petr, for the comments that you made in terms of making it real.
I want to say something, but I want to say it in the context of two things that happened to me. One was during the NAFTA debate. I happened to be in Washington D.C. by accident, and I happened to be driving down a street that led right up to the Capitol building at night, and I happened to have on the NAFTA debate in Congress, the North American Free-Trade Act debate. As the senators were debating this, I was stopped at the stop-light, and there was a man over on the sidewalk and he was begging for quarters. He had this milk jug so that if you threw a quarter to him across two highways, he would try to catch it in his milk jug. I was trying to think: what in the world is this debate about NAFTA? How was this going to affect or change his life? If he’s lucky, it won’t change it at all. If he’s not lucky, it’ll make his life a lot worse.
The other circumstance I was thinking about was something that just happened about a week ago. I was at one of my favourite coffee-houses in Portland, Oregon. I watched a man walk over to an outdoor trash can and he lifted the lid back and he pulled out a half-eaten sandwich and he started eating it. You know, here I am: sitting in the so-called “leader of the free world”, a so-called “superpower”, the so-called “most affluent society on the planet”, and there are people eating out of garbage cans. There are people sleeping in doorways and there are people sleeping on steam grates. This isn’t just an occurrence that you see here and there. This is happening in our cities.
So my question, and this is a question for me and it is also a question for our panel, is: are these examples of our system not working, or are these examples of our system at work? Is this the way the system works? Someone mentioned yesterday: “Well, we know there are going to be winners and losers.” Are these just the losers? And, have we created a system in such a way that the consequences of losing are so fundamental? I think that if we have that as a system, if that’s the result of the system, then we don’t have a system. And, if that’s the result of our system, we’d better work a lot faster and a lot harder to avoid those kind of circumstances. Thank you.

Mae-Wan Ho
Thank you. And now, Weiming Tu...

Weiming Tu
First I want to share some information. Two professors at Bucknell, through the Centre for the Study of World Religion in Harvard, co-ordinated a two-and-a-half-year plan to study religion and ecology. Nine conferences were organised on Buddhism, Confucianism, Shinto, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Janism, indigenous religious traditions and Taoism. Last September, there was a culminating conference at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, involving quite a number of scholars in humanities, social sciences and natural sciences, including Edward Wilson’s work on conciliation and then Michael McElroy, who is a scholar in climate, looking at the whole question of the relationship between religion, ethics and ecology and the work of Thomas Berry features very prominently in our discussion.
I think I mentioned this because that’s very much in relationship to the issue of ethics and the issues of epistemological implications. Thomas Berry has argued that a major attitudinal change is required, especially from the Baconian notion of the world of nature as the object of investigation, sometimes using a very dramatic notion of coercion experiments, in order to force nature to respond to our needs.
The idea is the possibility of developing a conception of a community of subjects, in other words, to understand not only within the human community and not just the global community, but also nature as an integral part of our human consciousness.
This may sound extremely idealistic, even impractical, but the plan is to look at the inter-relatedness of a number of human communications, in other words, we start with the self to the family, the community, the nation, the world and beyond. We need to have a sense of rootedness in our environment, but we need, at the same time, to be able to go beyond our self-centredness, our nepotism or parochialism, or even ethnocentrism, and so on, and so forth. The question is: unless we are able to go beyond anthropocentrism – which is also a form focusing on the Greek notion of “the man as the measure of all things” – at the much larger universe, will we be able to develop a kind of ecological consciousness that is absolutely critical for understanding the human condition here and now? In this sense, we also believe that philosophical thinking should be a way of life, or should be a spiritual exercise, rather than simply the detached observer of what is going on out there.
This also relates to Mr Lebeda’s notion about “pain and sensitivity”. But that “pain and sensitivity” is based upon awareness that what we are doing now is so limited. I think the most pessimistic scenario is that, increasingly, we understand all the things that we need to do in order to develop a sustainable way of life, and increasingly the social, political, economic and ideological structures are such that we are paralysed, incapable of making any major change. Therefore, the more we understand what’s going on, we become more “pained”, more agonised over the inability to change it. With clarity, we see the world as the world “going down the drain”. However, another possibility that Tom Berry, and others, talked about is a new conception, a new understanding of the human, not just in terms of “pain and sensitivity”, but also in terms of celebration. In other words, at this particular juncture, we as humans are capable of making some fundamental changes that have not been imaginable before. So, the great challenge is not simply a recognition of the inability to change, but also the willingness to re-conceptualise the human condition is such a way that we can understand – this is indeed a celebration. Now these two possibilities somehow define the complexity of the human condition.

Mae-Wan Ho
Thank you and I believe there was a contribution from a member of the audience. Yes, would you please come forward?

Jaromír Plešek
My name is Jaromír Plešek and I am a research chemist but I have been interested in environmental issues for several years. I have possibly three remarks. One is to quote what Hazel Henderson said in her speech about the so-called “perverse subsidies”. It is not your term, but I read this term in Professor Norman Myers’s article in Nature at the end of the year. This is a very serious matter and, in fact, Professor Myers says the same: that money going to these “perverse subsidies” is approximately 5 per cent of the global market, which is US$ 29 trillion, so 5 per cent of it is US$ 1.5 trillion. So this is one thing.
The other concerns the question of so-called “organic agriculture”. I am afraid this concept is not entirely realistic. Imagine how much food of any sort an organic farm can produce per acre, or per hectare, and how much we actually need. Around June of next year, we will pass the 6 billion mark, and imagine that we will need 1 kilogram of food, and 2 litres of water per person per day, so that every day it will require six million tonnes of food. The inhabitable surface of the Earth is approximately 100 million square kilometres. It means there will be, on average, 60 people living per square kilometre, and so on, and so on.
So, now I will summarise: I’m afraid that many of these discussions on ecology lack the basic facts and figures. It’s good to have good ideas, but it’s better to confront them with reality. Thank you.

Mae-Wan Ho
I’m sorry, I think the remark about organic agriculture is directed at something I said. Let me make it quite clear.
There are now many studies showing that organic agriculture of all kinds is producing two to three times the yield, or at least keeping up with the most intensive agro-chemical agricultures. You should read Regenerating Agriculture, a book by Jules Pretty, published by Earthscan. In fact, in the Third World this phenomenon of going back, recovering indigenous varieties and going back to organic sustainable agriculture was a necessity because people have been so marginalised, they have become so indebted, the agricultural land had become so degraded, that they cannot but try to grow their own food again without this high costly input. Within the past five to ten years, farmers all over the Third World have adopted organic agriculture of all kinds and recovered indigenous varieties, for example in India they have brought back – and perhaps Professor Nandy can say something more about that – indigenous varieties of rice that don’t need to be irrigated, do not need to be flooded. Moreover, recently I had the honour to be in Barcelona because a senior agronomist from Cuba was receiving a prize for agriculture. The reason is that – because of the American blockade – Cuba has not been able to get any agro-chemicals so, out of necessity, they converted one-third of their 11.5 million hectares of agriculture to fully organic, kept one-third agro-chemical, and one-third half and half. Now they’re finding that the yield from the fully organic is matching the fully agro-chemical, while the mixed transitional fields had only 50% of the yields.
This is recognised by all the experts on organic farming. This is an indication that organic farming can work on a large scale, and you will find that organic agriculture is increasing in popularity all over Europe. The soil association in the UK is getting numerous enquires every day from farmers who have been marginalised by the corporation of family farmers and they want to go organic and they keep flooding their telephone lines with requests.
I’m sorry, Hazel, I’ll let you answer the other point.

Hazel Henderson
Well, I just have to say that it’s the same thing in the United States. Organic agriculture and clean, healthy foods in health food stores, the market is growing by about 20% a year. It’s a very good investment. The kind of investment fund that I advise makes investments in organic agriculture, in green technologies, in this kind of TV that I’ve been talking about. There are many investment opportunities and, once you realise that we don’t have to debate the theory of all of this, it’s quite good to see all the capital markets turning around. For example we, at the Calvert Group, managed US$ 2 billion worth of assets of companies that have good environmental records, or who have enhancing environmental products like health foods and organic agriculture, and now there are so many funds that have grown up copying ours. Ours was started in 1982, with another of our criteria: we had the first fund that didn’t invest in South Africa under apartheid. We only invest in companies that don’t manufacture weapons, don’t have any nuclear energy, don’t use testing on animals, and these funds, all of these things, in the United States alone, account for US$ 1.3 trillion worth of assets. Now, who invests in these kinds of funds? Church groups and the portfolios of universities.
Instead of arguing economic theory with economists, who told us that we would lose our shirts if we tried to invest in this way, we simply advertised. We said: “Are there investors out there who care about their grandchildren; who care about their planet; who care about apartheid; and who care about fairness to workers? These investors just pour in and give us their funds and, even in a down market, we’re one of the very few mutual funds that hasn’t lost any investors in these past few weeks, because they love us. They say: Who else could we invest our money with... you’re the only ball-game in town.
The encouraging thing is that the Securities and Exchange Commission tells us they have 40 new funds like ours in registration right now, and the biggest brokerage house on Wall Street, Merrill Lynch, just put its own fund together. So, you see, I decided that I didn’t want to debate with economists, I wanted to hire them and have them assess these investment opportunities... then we just move the whole thing along.

Mae-Wan Ho
May I invite this lady to come forward to give us her contribution?

Miluše Kubíčková
My name is Miluše Kubíčková, and I am an educationalist and a socialist and, above all, a human being who tries to live in the wider environment. I was very impressed by the sentence of our Madam Moderator, who said: “People, man or woman, is the end, or ought to be, the end and not the means.” Yes, but let us ask under what condition could it be so? I would mention our great educationalist, Jan Amos Comenius, our Czech teacher and great scientist and spiritual man, who said: “First of all, man can be free if he may, or is allowed; if he can, or is able; but, also if he knows how.” That is why it’s wonderful that last year the Commission for Education for the 21st Century, UNESCO, declared four pillars of future education, and all of these pillars are in relation to what we are discussing here.
The first pillar is to learn how to live together, and I was impressed by the lecture of Mr Moldan when he was speaking about communities. This is a place which provides an opportunity to live together. We could be happy that under the outer image of economic globalisation there exits something which is not very well known, which is very humble, very new, that is, there are very many new communities all over the world. Let us take some examples: in Scotland there is an eco-village; in India; in Israel, the kibbutz; or, in our country in many places where we try to use the community voice of living. I am a bit like the head of such a small group of people who try to understand what is the real environment. Allow me to comment on this notion of the term “environment”. Isn’t it a bit of a reductionism if we say that our environment is only nature? The word “echo” is derived from the Greek oikhos, and it is something more: it’s home, and the first home where we live is our body, and it’s said that some people who are great ecologists don’t honour or respect their own body... they destroy their body. And they forget that their body is a part of nature. So, let us go to the four pillars:
The first pillar is to learn to live together. The second pillar relates to the epistemology of relations (thank you very much for this notion), it is how to know. The third pillar is how to act, not only to discuss but to act. The fourth pillar is how to be, and here we can mention the wonderful work by Erich Fromm, To Have or to Be.
So, acknowledging all these homes, all these oikhos of men, it means acknowledging the body, the psyche, that I am also a social being, that I am a part of cultural history, but that I am also a part of the cosmos and that everything together is the environment. So, I was very happy when you spoke about the reductionism in science, but the chief enemy of our epistemology, of our knowing, of our acting, is our reductionism in philosophy, in the very narrow world-view that we have. Thank you very much.

Mae-Wan Ho
Thank you for a very beautiful contribution. I have to re-direct your compliment from myself to Hans Küng because he was the person who said human beings should be regarded as the end and not the means.
I think we have now come to the end of the hour. You would really want to say something, Mr Sükösd?

Miklós Sükösd
I did pose a question about long-term prospects and forecasts, and you just forgot about this in the heat of argument or it’s a statement that the answer didn’t come.

Hazel Henderson
Actually, yes I did. I don’t think it’s useful to think about optimists and pessimists. I think it stands in the way of simply acting out of one’s conviction. You know at the World Watch Institute, our leader, my dear friend Lester Brown, is called Dr Doom in Washington. I spent a lot of my life examining all of the social pathology, and the ecological pathology, and our friend Abdullah is quite right: the system is pathological at the moment; but then I began to realise that I should also map all of those same systems for potential, and there’s a lot of potential there, as long as you have a big enough model and you can see how to make new connections across all the old boundaries. So let’s just go ahead and be optimistic or to act in hope.

Mae-Wan Ho
Thank you very much. It now remains for me to thank both our excellent speakers and our panellists, and also the other excellent contributions from the floor. I have certainly learned a great deal, and I have taken Weiming’s comments to heart. I am in my very learning mode, and I look forward to an excellent tomorrow. Thank you very much.