By Caroline Grindrod
We are in the midst of a cost of living crisis and face unprecedented disruption to our food and energy supplies.
I’ve been banging on about the looming food catastrophe for more years than I like to remember. I’ve made myself wholly unpopular with my family and friends and become accustomed to the eye-rolling or glazed looks this issue generally elicits.
In the crazed competition for efficiency and cost-cutting, we have stripped out every slither of redundancy and resilience from our food and energy systems. Globalisation has undermined healthy, resilient local rural communities worldwide with the promise of a better life as a serial consumer. Efficiencies will keep costs low, and technology will make our lives easier, leading to more leisure time with more money to spend.
How has that worked out for you?
In the west, globalisation has negotiated unrestricted access to freely available cheap labour. Facilitated business with countries with poor environmental protection willing to exploit their natural resources and pollute their rivers. If you measure success in terms of economic growth, globalisation has been a huge success.
Blissfully unaware that globalisation has eroded the very essence of what really matters about being human, we consumers have all become comfortably numb from the anaesthetising effects of materialism. Eventually, however, these externalities are going to come home to roost.
Aside from the utterly heartbreaking human suffering and tragic ecocide that has resulted from the economic ‘growth at any cost’ agenda, infinite growth on a finite planet is just not a sensible long-term business plan! Globalisation only works when the whole world is playing nicely together. Sadly, like a tired and hungry bunch of toddlers, when resources and relationships come under strain, there are inevitably going to be tears.
That time is now.
In this three-part series, we will dip into the economic, social and ecological implications of globalisation and propose a possible alternative way forward.
Globalisation started with a simple sales pitch; that lifting people from ‘poverty’ is a good thing, and that this is done by creating jobs and making stuff cheap.
In ‘sacred economics’ Charles Eisenstein states that the concept of poverty has been badly misunderstood. Helena Norberg-Hodge further illustrates this in the film ‘economics of happiness’ where she explains how western culture and globalisation have systematically undermined the happiness and resilience of the rural communities in Ladakh.
In many rural village communities where most farmers are subsistence farmers, the families may be living simple lives, but this must not be confused with being ‘poor.’
The services upon which we spend our hard-earned, stress-sweated cash were freely available as part of the rich community culture of exchange. It deepened the interdependence of all in the village and made them highly resilient. Everyone had a value, and everyone had a role. The village would collectively look after the children and share labour at planting and harvest; elders would offer counsel and carry forward the stories from past to present.
There was no need for nursery fees, and expensive counselling sessions, no time-saving junk food, no membership fee for a brightly lit gym, and no trendy brands or costly cars to prove our worth. The needs that these paid goods and services attempt to meet were freely available to the community so no money changed hands. This led to westerners declaring the villagers as ‘living in poverty’ and in need of ‘education’, ‘support’ in the form of cheap ‘stuff’ and access to jobs in the city.
Many of us find it hard to imagine life in a village in the foothills of the Himalayas, but we too had elements of this gift economy in the UK not so very long ago.
My Grandparents were some of the happiest and healthiest people I have ever known. Bringing up five children in a council house in Newcastle couldn’t have been easy on a carpenter’s wage. But my hard-working and resourceful Grandparents had a large back garden where they grew nearly all of their own – pretty much organic – vegetables. What food they didn’t grow was purchased from the local butcher or foraged from the hedgerows.
The broth pan was always on, and nothing was ever wasted. Clothing and shoes were the best they could afford, mended and valued highly. The bus and ‘shanks pony’ was their only form of transport.
Holidays were few and focused on the UK countryside – anywhere with fruit-laden hedges – and my Grandad thought nothing of cycling 100 miles at the weekend on his fixed-wheel bicycle with his fellow club members for ‘relaxation’ and catching up with his mates. Gran was an enthusiastic member of the WI, and her preserving, baking and pickling capabilities knew no bounds. She was undoubtedly an invaluable member of the community, and to me, her skills were more inspiring than any power-driven female entrepreneur.
In their family, there was a culture of love, laughter, respect and values such as; don’t waste anything, look after your stuff and treating others as you hope to be treated yourself. My amazing parents passed on the benefit of this grounded start to life by bringing forward many of the same values and resilience.
How could it be possible that things have changed so dramatically in my lifetime?
The resources available to the average family have expanded beyond all recognition. Iphones, giant TVs, multiple cars per household, dishwashers, takeaways, foreign holidays and food costing less than a quarter it did in the 1960s as a % of the household income.
Globalisation has made all of this possible. But at what cost?
We are sicker, lonelier and unhappier than at any other point in time that we bothered to ask people. We have outsourced the true cost of our comfort and convenience to far away parts of the world where it’s still legal to exploit people and the environment. This has led to a decoupling of our standard of living from what our planet can actually sustain.
The fragile globalised ‘just in time’ food system is at breaking point. And the collapse was inevitable long before Putin rolled the tanks into Ukraine. 1,2
Over the last hundred years, we have shifted from a gift and community-based economy where the forms of capital were diverse and culturally fitting for the community’s needs; to a monoculture economy based on just cold hard money. People, animals and the planet have suffered as a consequence.
Whether it has been deliberate or an inevitable by-product of the mechanistic paradigm of the world is a matter of debate; for a global money-based economy to work best, it first needs to undermine the services that are freely given in a cohesive traditional subsistence community. Services such as childcare, mental support, food exchange, fuel harvesting and building infrastructure don’t get captured on a balance sheet and cannot be taxed.
Measuring the success of a country by measuring economic growth is absurd. Every time someone has a heart attack and is prescribed a drug, every time a tanker leaks oil and requires a vast cleanup operation and every time a hard-working couple invests their life savings into their dream business and it fails – GDP increases.
Due to subsidies, cutthroat competitive efficiencies of scale and other complicated factors, it makes good economic sense to grow chicken in America and send it to China to be skinned and then back to America to be sold. 3
It explains why it is cheaper for the remote rural communities of Ladakh to buy butter from across the world rather than buy it from their community. And could be something to do with why severe sanctions on unfriendly countries could mean that we are effectively sanctioning ourselves into extreme food and energy shortages!
I had been hopeful that the climate crisis would bring in a new way of doing business that helps to reduce emissions and increase biodiversity. But, unfortunately, the new carbon economy has been designed from the same mechanistic paradigm of the old ‘economic growth at any cost’ accounting system.
It has been assumed that you can take an elegant holistic living system that has evolved harmonious interdependent systems and climate cooling efficiencies over millennia, and account for it in a spreadsheet of simplistic carbon equivalents. This is an insult to nature’s intelligent design and highlights to me that we have – surely – reached ‘peak’ reductionist insanity. 4,5,6
The same machine thinking has designed our food system. It is justified to ship lamb from New Zealand to the UK because it has a smaller carbon footprint but it escapes us that this undermines the biodiversity of the uplands because shepherds need to ‘get big or get out’ in order to compete. Of course, there are many issues with the current way we farm but as we will discuss in the next article we could be evolving a more agroecological approach within the current decentralised and resilient model. Unfortunately, the need for small-scale farms for diversified nutrition security is now considered a quaint thing of the past.
The next looming social and environmental car crash could be the yet uncalculated negative impact of switching from petrol cars to electric cars. The growing demand for electric car batteries leads to unprecedented demand for nickel and cobalt and new mining opportunities are being exploited on the deep seabed.
”Most of the cobalt used in batteries today is claimed by China from mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where extraction has come with human rights abuses and environmental degradation.
As pressure mounts to claim terrestrial minerals, commercial interest is growing to extract resources from the deep seabed, where there’s an abundance of metals like copper, cobalt, nickel, manganese, lead and lithium. Investors already expect profits: One deep-sea mining company recently announced a plan to go public after merging with an investment group, creating a corporation with an expected $2.9 billion market value.” 7
Lithium is an essential metal for electric car batteries and the surge in demand has led to a so-called ‘white oil’ rush unleashing a mining boom that promises environmental destruction wherever it is found. 8
And my personal favourite was the VSCO girl craze that led to teenage girls thinking they were environmentally conscious and saving turtles because they bought branded hydro flasks and metal straws. 9
Unfortunately, you can’t shop your way out of ecocide, no matter how trendy it is!
The problem with all of these so-called environmental solutions is that they all come from the same stable; globalisation.
We can barely keep up with what’s happening in our own neighbourhood these days. We are so distracted by one crisis after another – or high-profile divorce trials – that keeping tabs on the environmental damage and social exploitation caused by companies selling eco ‘solutions’ is to all intents and purposes; impossible.
Even if we were to assume that large corporations were genuinely interested in regenerating the planet and improving people’s lives more than ensuring their shareholders are satiated, who is going to regulate them that doesn’t have a vested interest? When a government’s only language is economic growth, its main job becomes removing barriers to allow money to flow!
How do we citizens know what to choose to ‘do good?’
The promised lifting of poverty that sold us globalisation hasn’t been delivered. It has kicked the can of paying the true cost of things down the road until we have run out of tarmac. The true cost of the social and environmental consequences is now crashing down upon us.
There’s plenty of alarming research out there warning us of the fragility of the just in time food system if we choose to look for it. But we don’t. Instead, we ignore the problems until we can’t ignore them anymore. When fuel reaches £2 a litre, baby formula is missing from the supermarket shelves, penicillin isn’t available from the vet, trucks carrying our food won’t start because they have run out of AdBlue, your car won’t run because of a part not arriving, and health services fail due to a shortage of computer chips from Taiwan…..
Just like we cover up the gaps in the supply chain by spreading out the remaining available brands on the shelves, the potentially catastrophic consequences of a failing global supply chain are masked until the very end leaving you utterly unprepared.
So what is the alternative? It might be too late to arrest the terrifying looming food crisis but we can and must start now to build a better more resilient model. 10,11,12,13
Complex systemic ‘wicked’ problems cannot be solved with yet more mechanistic responses.
As the author Marriane Williamson says;
‘the best ones to drive us out of this mess are not those who drove us into the ditch in the first place’
It’s high time for a new paradigm of doing business and supplying food. The emergence of regenerative leadership, regenerative design and regenerative business offer a potential glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel.
Authors of ‘Regenerative leadership’ Laura Storm and Giles Hurthchins say;
There is no doubt. We are living in a time marked by great upheaval and volatility. Leaders – both political and business – are being forced to cope with rising challenges: resource scarcity; high levels of stress in the workplace; disruptive innovations; social inequality; constant competition for top talent; rapid digitization and globalization; mass migrations; fragile supply chains; mounting social tensions; political extremism; and much more.
On top of all this, the climate of our planet is breaking down and we are facing what scientists have called the sixth mass extinction.
Our production systems are based on a linear, take-make-waste approach. Our financial systems based on short-term profit maximization that ignore life and debase human integrity. Our organizational systems are dominated by hyper-competition, power-and-control hierarchies, and rising stress.
We need a new approach that values life. A new leadership logic where organisations flourish, ecosystems thrive and people feel alive. This is what Regenerative Leadership is all about.’’
A sustainable business might aim for ‘polluting less’ and a regenerative business will be aiming to support the restoration of planetary systems.
It might seem like an impossible task to change the huge corporations that currently dominate the marketplace but maybe we don’t need to start there. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are responsible for approximately 70 per cent of the global pollution and just shy of 17 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
There is a short window of opportunity to encourage the emergence of regenerative leadership within SMEs to generate the sorts of changes that could lead to a positive tipping point that opens up a new path for humanity and our planet.
To operationalise the goal of regenerative business presents three regenerative strategies of “restore,” “preserve,” and “enhance” beyond “exploit,” as shown below. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18
If SMEs can rapidly climb the regenerative ladder of “restore,” “preserve,” and “enhance” as a spectrum of opportunities toward the goal. Regenerative economic approaches could help both society and the planet thrive in the long term. 19
What if instead of centralised control by corporate giants who exert a disproportionate influence on the supply ecosystems, we could create a decentralised network of SMEs working like a web to restore planetary functions?
It might sound like an ‘airy fairy’ vision but it’s one increasingly being taken seriously in our business world as leaders struggle to deal with the current volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous landscape.
Forbes magazine recognises the potential for this new paradigm of doing business;
‘’What if companies reinvented their supply chains and business practices so they function altruistically like a forest? Then they will operate as regenerative businesses that give back 10x and even 100x more to society and the planet than what they take from it.’’ Nature is generous—a virtue you don’t associate with the cut-throat corporate world. Forest trees magnanimously share information and nutrients with each other using a deep network of soil fungi.
What if new economies regenerated the cultures that globalisation degraded and recognised more diversified forms of capital such as the eight forms of capital in permaculture models. And valued financial capital alongside; material capital, living capital, cultural capital, social capital, experiential capital and intellectual capital. 20
What if like Bhutan, instead of valuing a country’s success in terms of gross domestic product (GDP) we measure ‘Gross national happiness” where sustainable development takes a more integrated approach towards a nation’s progress and gives equal importance to non-economic aspects of wellbeing. 21
And what if the universal patterns and principles of the cosmos were used as a model for economic-system design to build healthy, and sustainable systems throughout the real world.
As highlighted in the Guardian piece ‘globalisation the rise and fall of an idea that swept the world’ It was only a few decades ago that globalisation was held by many, even by some critics, to be an inevitable, unstoppable force. “Rejecting globalisation,” the American journalist George Packer has written, “was like rejecting the sunrise.”
Natural intelligence guided our planet to have the exact climatic and atmospheric conditions for human life to emerge. Through photosynthesis, complex biodiversity and cooling hydrology we had the perfect habitat in which to thrive. Over the last few centuries, we have exploited this living organism to the point that we have reversed these processes and created an almost uninhabitable place to exist.
My hope is that we humans can evolve quickly enough to recognise the arrogance of assuming we know better than nature with our technologies and scientific advances. And to see the error of valuing only what we can measure with our mechanistic worldview at the expense of all that really matters to humans such as happiness, feeling healthy, close communities, authentic interactions, fulfilment and beauty.
As the sun sets on the ‘growth at all cost’ era of globalisation, and society has moved through its collective ‘dark night of the soul’, we must ensure that how we build our businesses and money systems is in service to people and the planet and uses nature’s wisdom and logic as a template.
Caroline X
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