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Preface

THE WAY THAT PEOPLE provide for themselves is in growing conflict with the integrity of Earth’s ecological and social systems. The disconnect is so severe that it is now easier to imagine Earth’s life-support systems breaking down than to imagine that our ecologically incoherent and destructive economic system will be significantly altered.

Our concern about this lethal failure of imagination drove us to write this book to bring focus and direction to the growing, urgent cries for change. Our purpose is to offer people from all walks of life an ethical guidance system based on “right relationship.” This book aims to integrate scientific understanding with an ethical stance and spiritual optimism informed by that understanding. This integration of ethics and science grounds an innovative governance for the well-being of Earth’s entire community of life. We hope that a new orientation built on these foundations, and on humanity’s enduring ethical and cultural traditions, will help people to organize their individual and collective economic lives in a way that promotes a flourishing community of life on Earth.

Most of us have been conditioned to accept the operation of today’s global economic system as an article of faith. We have learned to view unlimited growth and wealth accumulation as the “natural law” of the economy, and we were taught that nothing can be done to alter this fact—even if it means the integrity of Earth’s ecological and social systems will be severely damaged or even permanently compromised. This “inconvenient truth” poses a moral challenge. While this is not explicitly a Quaker book, its use of right relationship as a point of focus arises from the same deep commitment to human solidarity, human betterment, and the well-being of the commonwealth of life that the Religious Society of Friends (known as Quakers), as well as many others, endeavor to carry forward and put into practice in the world. We hope the idea of right relationship as a way to build a whole earth economy resonates with people from a broad range of life experience as they wrestle with the moral challenge posed by a lethal economy.

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This is not the first time that moral challenge has confronted the growth-driven economy. We found inspiration for this book in heartening stories of our Quaker forebears. On the afternoon of May 22, 1787, a group of twelve men met in a Quaker bookstore and printing shop at 2 George Yard in London. This meeting of nine members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and three Anglicans was the start of a catalytic campaign for social change. This small group was determined to end British participation in the slave trade and abolish slavery throughout the British Empire. They were deeply convinced that slavery was a wrong relationship between humans, and the need to put it right impelled them to take action.

Quakers, along with many other citizens who shared their vision of right relationship in both England and America, had already taken a stand on slavery and had been working to arouse the conscience of their respective nations against an economy based on it. Their general opposition had had little effect, because “everyone knew” that slavery was ordained by “natural law” and essential to the economic growth of the Empire.

The organized campaign of moral suasion that Quakers and their Anglican allies launched from that meeting in the printing shop successfully challenged the “natural law” of slavery and its economic status. In 1791, a report to Parliament by a Select Committee on the Abolition of the Slave Trade still characterized the slave trade as having “the plea of necessity for its continuance.” Yet the next year Parliament passed its first law banning the slave trade.

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Fast-forward two centuries. In June 2003, thirty-nine Quakers met at Pendle Hill, a Quaker study center in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, to consider the moral challenge posed by the global economic system that is heedlessly destroying the integrity of Earth’s ecosystems and failing to serve the well-being of hundreds of millions of people. The gathering included economists, ecologists, and public-policy professionals determined to look deeply into the conflict between economic trends and ecology, with a view to understanding the full moral context of our deteriorating human– Earth relationship.

The participants did not feel daunted. They came well prepared, and together they advanced a larger moral context for economic analysis and for reconceptualizing the economy within a vision of ecological stewardship and the well-being of the entire commonwealth of life. Soon after, the Quaker Institute for the Future (QIF) was born as a venue for research, joining a community of other Quaker organizations, such as Quaker Earthcare Witness in the United States, the Quaker Environmental Action Network in Canada, and Quaker Peace and Social Welfare in Great Britain, as well as non-Quaker groups worldwide too numerous to mention with similar concerns. QIF initiated the Moral Economy Project, from which this book comes, as its first avenue of witness and service.

Those eighteenth-century Quakers and their allies who launched the movement to end the slave trade, and slavery itself, eventually won the day and brought down the economic interests that argued for the “natural law” of profit over all. We are inspired not just by that singular victory, but also by the work of several other Quakers who took action to promote changes based on their deep conviction that something was not right. One of them, John Bellers, a British Quaker who lived in the late seventeenth century, was the first social thinker to conceive of universal health care as a public policy. He was the first economist to advance a comprehensive plan for vocational training and sustainable employment as a national solution to chronic poverty.

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Another person who had immense impact on history was John Woolman, an eighteenth-century American Quaker, who traveled widely to speak out against such social ills as slavery, greed, and material excess. He even insisted on paying the slaves of the people he visited for their service on his behalf. Largely as the result of his efforts, slave-holding among American Quakers ended a full century before the Civil War. A third was Lucretia Mott, an American Quaker who was an antislavery crusader and women’s rights leader; along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she organized the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, the first American women’s rights meeting. Closer to our own time was Bayard Rustin, an African-American Quaker, who was a leading behind-the-scenes strategist of the nonviolent movement for civil rights in twentieth-century America. British Quaker business entrepreneurs in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as the Lloyds, the Cadburys, the Rowntrees, and the Quakers who founded Friends Provident (the first pension and ethical fund), showed by example that business activity and investment can be both profitable and principled.

The ecological perspective that has increasingly come to be part of the spiritual life of Quakers has roots in their history that are as deep as their social concerns. John Woolman, for one, clearly understood that unwise use of resources leads to ecosystem breakdown, in the same ways that unjust use of labor leads to societal breakdown. In 1763, he visited two Native American villages in what is now northeastern Pennsylvania. He noted in his Journal the way that Native peoples had been driven from the resource-rich lands and waters of the coastal regions into the rougher, more difficult lands of the interior. He lamented the greed and drive for wealth accumulation that robbed Native peoples of their land and livelihood. He wrote that the land under English tenure was rapidly being depleted of its fertility by the growing of large quantities of grain for export to Europe, while the poor laborers and their livestock were suffering for lack of adequate and affordable forage.

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Woolman clearly saw “the spreading of a wrong spirit,” and wrote that “the seeds of great calamity and desolation are sown and growing fast on this continent.” He urged his fellow countrymen, according to what he called “universal righteousness” (in effect, right relationship), to “rise up . . . and labour to check the growth of these seeds that they may not ripen to the ruin of our posterity.”¹

When Woolman kept his Journal, the calamity had already happened for Native Peoples; the American Civil War was yet to come. And now the seeds of the economic, ecological, and social calamity that Woolman understood would reach far into the future have sprouted into a massively invasive set of wrong relationships. The ruin he feared is today clearly seen in the breakdown of life-support systems unfolding worldwide.

John Woolman is a key inspiration for the establishment of the Quaker Institute for the Future, the Moral Economy Project, and even the writing of this book. Kenneth Boulding, a twentieth-century American Quaker, an economist, and a pioneer in general systems analysis, is another. He was among the first social scientists to recognize Earth’s ecological context as the primary reference for all progressive thinking, policy, and action with regard to the human future. In 1965 he gave a short address to Washington State University’s Committee on Space Sciences, the title of which introduced a powerful metaphor—“Earth as a Space Ship.” A year later he wrote and published an expanded essay on this seminal image—“ The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth.” Boulding’s work in this and many other essays and studies is exemplary of the integrative, holistic approach that has helped to create the ecological worldview and establish this new way of understanding the human–Earth relationship.²

Boulding was fully conversant with the cosmological and earth sciences that structure our ecological worldview. He was especially skilled in laying out the implications for human economic behavior, based on what we now know about how “spaceship Earth” functions. In his later years, he initiated a seminar program that he called Quaker Studies on Human Betterment. As with John Woolman, this book, along with the Quaker Institute for the Future and the Moral Economy Project, grew directly from the legacy of Kenneth Boulding.

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In a profound sense, economics and ecology are domains of relationship. Economics is about access to the means of life. Ecology is about the mutual interdependence of life communities. Using right relationship as the unifying mechanism, this book brings these two perspectives together, pivoting the lens of human solidarity and the lens of ecological science into a single focus. Right relationship becomes the central motif both in the social design of human well-being and in ecologically sound economic adaptation. The Quaker tradition teaches that in right relationship, people may touch the fullness of human meaning, and, some would say, the presence of the Divine. Quaker practice is about elevating all areas of human policy and practice into this zone of right relationship.

This book, written by a cooperative group, emerged from the Quaker tradition of dialogue and truth-seeking. The Moral Economy Project and the authors of this book start with the fact that human well-being is entirely dependent on the well-being of the whole commonwealth of life.

The Introduction gets things started with definitions of key terms, such as “right relationship,” “commonwealth of life,” and “whole earth economy.” Although a number of moral terms are possible candidates for inclusion in a definition of “right relationship,” we have chosen to ground it, with some modification, in Aldo Leopold’s land ethic, set out in his seminal book A Sand County Almanac.

Then we introduce five questions that are discussed in detail in the book’s five chapters: What is the economy for? How does it work? How big should it be? What is a fair distribution of its benefits and burdens? How should it be governed? Right relationship is the key to answering these questions in a way that will allow the economy to nourish and preserve the community of life on earth, instead of working toward its destruction. Using right relationship as the guide leads to some surprising answers. The economy exists for respecting and preserving life, not getting rich. Its frame of reference must be the laws that govern the cosmos as well as the earth—not just, for example, the laws of supply and demand. The economy can grow too big for the earth’s ecological limits, which means that endless growth is an irrational goal. Fair distribution of the economy’s benefits and burdens means it is possible to be both too rich and too poor. Governing a whole earth economy will require a new set of rules and institutions that have the support of the entire global community and that invigorate local communities and innovation, rather than stifle them. Answers to the five questions forge a way for people to work together to build a whole earth economy, step by step.

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Economics based on consumerism and obsession with growth has become, in effect, the modern world’s state-sponsored religion. This economy now needs, for the sake of the human future and indeed the future of the entire community of life, the same wind of change that was earlier directed at abolishing the economy of slavery. Nobody who aspires to human solidarity and ecological integrity should rely on the political-financial establishment and its supporting cast of economists and policy makers even to envision these changes, let alone bring them about. With the guidance system set out in this book, we are endeavoring to link hands with all those now rising up to build a whole earth economy—one that restores and enhances the integrity, resilience, and beauty of life’s commonwealth.

Peter G. Brown
Geoffrey Garver
Keith Helmuth
Robert Howell
Leonard Joy
Steve Szeghi

September 2008

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