EARTHFUTURE.COM by Guy Dauncey

I had an early morning daydream recently. I was looking at the Earth and there was a great crowd of people moving across it, from the bottom left to the top right, following a route that would lead them over the top and down the other side.
The whole Earth was made of delicious food -- ice cream, cheese, chocolate, croissants, coffee, desserts, quiches, curries -- and the people were eating her. As they ate, they moved up the path. From my perspective, however, I knew that when they rounded the top and looked over the other side, they were going to have an awful shock; the other side was a barren clearcut. They'd already been there, and there was nothing left.
We are eating our planet. Since 1950, we have taken 90 percent of all the large fish -- tuna, cod and swordfish -- from the world's oceans. In the deep seas, where fish reproduce much more slowly, our plundering has caused some stocks to fall by 99.6 percent. From a biological perspective, we are consuming everything there is: topsoil, forests, minerals, fish, water, land and wildlife. And we've only just begun. All over the developing world, from Moscow to Mexico City, people are dreaming of the day when they will be able to join the banquet and get their share.
This is so unreal. We are the culmination of the hopes, hardships and efforts of hundreds of generations. Our ancestors have slowly pieced together the skills and technologies that make it possible for us to strip the oceans, clear-cut the forests, suck the oil, develop the subdivisions and drive to the megastores to feast on materials from the farthest corners of the Earth. Did they realize that we would take the lot, and leave nothing for the future. On Vancouver Island in the 19th century, settler Robert Dunsmuir, a lowly coal miner from Scotland, became very successful as a mine owner. In 1879, he won a contract to build the railway from Nanaimo to Victoria, for which he received two million acres of land, plus all the trees, minerals, foreshore rights and $750,000. The First Nations' lands were appropriated, without consultation.
Robert's son, James Dunsmuir, became the premier of BC in 1900. Together, they built two castles in Victoria: Craigdarroch and Hatley. James had 12 children, and the Dunsmuir offspring tucked right into their inheritance. Between drinking, gambling and family quarrels, they spent the lot. Today, nothing remains except the castles.
The moral has to do with stewardship. When families have retained their wealth for a long time, they know to live off the earnings, not the capital. When a family has no such history, its members tend to get over-excited and blow the lot.
This is our dilemma. For 99 percent of the planet's people, this is the first time they have had access to such wealth. There is no appreciation of our common ecological wealth, and no instinct to preserve it. We are eating the planet as if it were ice cream.
How do we generate a deep, abiding sense of the value of Earth's ecological riches, so that we preserve them and live off their interest, rather than their capital? How do we internalize this into the way the world's corporations run their affairs? How do we internalize it into our accountancy, so that we count the forests, topsoil and fish stocks as capital to be preserved, not as lottery winnings to be splurged?
Every household, organization, business and government needs to start doing green bookkeeping. With each item that we purchase, we need to ask, "Are we taking this from Earth's ecological capital, or does it come from interest?" Locally grown organic food derives from interest; so does sustainably managed timber, certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. Ikea is a good example of a corporation that is moving to source its materials from the Earth's interest, not its capital, using The Natural Step organization's road map. We all need to do the same.
Guy Dauncey is the author of Stormy Weather: 101 Solutions to Global Climate Change and president of the BC Sustainable Energy Association.