Wolves, externalities and finding balance

Externalities are not something most of us understand or have ever had to concern ourselves about, until now.

The idea of putting a cost on carbon was just a small step toward helping us understand that an externality is a real cost that someone, somewhere has to burden.

The Yellowstone National Park - the
 return of wolves brought new
life to all aspects of the park.

Corporations and businesses of the world, including all those in Australia, have for centuries cheerfully ignored, to the benefit of their bank balances, the real cost of externalities.

Of course, it is unfair and irresponsible, to lump responsibility for ignoring externalities upon only business, as individuals, you and me, are equally liable for how the machine, that is the economy, works as we are also intimate players in the activity.

Speaking on a panel at Shepparton’s Eastbank before the naming of the winner of the 2014 Indigenous Ceramic Arts Award, Arts Victoria’s Liz Little said “Everything affects everything else”.

Liz was obviously speaking about art, but she could have been talking about externalities for everything we do clearly impacts everything else.

A clear and obvious example of that comes from America’s Yellowstone National Park where wolves, which had been missing for 70 years, were reintroduced in 1995.

Although a predator, the wolves controlled the size of deer herds, forced them to different parts of the park, allowing amazing regrowth or trees, plants and shrubs encouraging the return of birdlife; beavers began damming streams and rivers again encouraging the return of various species that thrived in the pools; and balance was returning to the park.

Ms Little wasn’t talking about wolves in Yellowstone Park and nor was she talking about externalities when she said “Everything affects everything else”, but her comment was prescient.

Her truism takes us direct to the problem and until we are prepared to put a cost on our externalities, those things we dump in our atmosphere, our oceans, our rivers and many landfills, we will continue to soil our own nest, making it ultimately unliveable.

Australia’s “great big new tax” (the carbon tax) was a first, and timid step toward seeing people here at least acknowledging that “Everything affects everything else”.

It was also a somewhat apprehensive move toward having us understand the real costs, financial and otherwise, of externalities and the complication of ignoring the rather brutal reality that “Everything affects everything else”.

Solutions to this dilemma are straightforward and simple, but as they require significant changes to our behaviour they are not socially palatable.

However, necessity will soon override any reservations as our abuse of those externalities will brings changes to what we see as normal.

Maybe it is time we familiarized ourselves with the idea behind the Yellowstone Park wolves and brought the balance back into our lives.

 

The dilemmas brought on by impartiality

Impartiality frequently frustrates many decent things.

Singer's book, "One
World: The Ethics
 of Globalization".

Equally, it is also often the keystone in allowing less than favourable things to happen to individuals, the broader community and, in a wider and crucial sense, to the wellbeing of the planet.

Partiality among humans is immensely powerful among families and friends, but erodes as relationships between people become increasingly distant and then collapses completely to become impartial, even disinterested, once people become “the other”.

Writing in “One World: The Ethics of Globalization” moral philosopher, Peter Singer, said; “Our real desires, our lasting and strongest passions, are not for the good of our species as a whole, but, at best, for the good of those who are close to us”.

Singer wrote that more than a decade ago and although the challenges of climate change were then well known, they had not evolved to be so internationally divisive as they are now, but his observations were prescient.

Within Singer’s writings are the reasons for our disinterest, our impartiality, in how our behaviours are impacting on earth’s atmosphere.

Life, particularly for most in Australia, is pretty good and so with rare exceptions we imagine ourselves as distant from anyone or anything that is worsening climate change and so have little sense of how our behaviour contributes to what has be called the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced.

We are, it seems, trapped within the paradigm that Singer discusses where he says that “Our real desires, our lasting and strongest passions, are not for the good of our species as a whole, but, at best, for the good of those who are close to us”.

Addressing the dilemmas and dangers of climate change demands that we explore and understand impartiality, and embrace it with an urgency that will hopefully allow us to act appropriately to mitigate the unfolding damage to our atmosphere.

Impartiality has been one of the great frustrations experienced by international support organizations and they have found that through reducing their appeal for help to a personal level by using an image of a sole person needing help, they made the connection between recipient and potential donor partial.

With the reason for funding now igniting our “real desires, our lasting and strongest passions”, the support sought was frequently forthcoming.

The damage to earth’s atmosphere is happening, by human standards, so slowly and its effects are frequently so remote from our daily affairs that most of us have a decided impartiality about climate change.

Many of us are unable to make the connection between our behaviour and what is happening with our climate and subsequent worsening weather it brings upon us because we are impartial and largely oblivious to anything beyond family, friends and immediate concerns.