Murray Grimwood reviews the Helen Clark Foundation book Facing up to our Future, and the Reality of Everything symposium

By Murray Grimwood*

Recently the Helen Clark Foundation published ‘Facing up to our Future’, in the format of an edited collection of opinion-pieces. It follows the similarly-formatted ‘The Big Questions; What is New Zealand’s Future?’, published back in 2018 by Penguin, which I reviewed at that time.

Recently too, Catherine Knight and associates hosted a day-long symposium: ‘The Reality of Everything’ at Massey University; usefully compared to a somewhat directionless 2013 effort from Victoria University headed ‘Valuing Nature’. Overlap is limited; Jonathan Boston shows up in three of the four, Stuart McNaughton, twice.

All four are usefully comparable to ‘Unquiet Time; Aotearoa/New Zealand in a fast-changing world’, written in 2017 by Colin James. The takeaway, perhaps, is that a single generalist is capable of producing a more cohesive narrative than a gaggle, but there is a bigger takeaway, and for that we need to paint the backdrop.

Big picture

The facts are simple; we are – for all our airs and graces – a species; a lifeform sharing a finite planet with others, some of whom are essential to our existence. All life is an energy-equation, a fact missed by most. Our species might have been OK had it limited itself to just using the daily (solar) energy input, but we have repeatedly overrun the stored surrounding energy (trees, usually) and repeatedly collapsed. This time we have dug into a fossilised one-off underground store of the stuff – coal, oil and gas - and showed that we were no more sapient than yeast. We are now grossly overshot, wildfires and wars being mere symptoms of same. But this time, for the first and only possible time, we are running the overshoot experiment, globally.

Rather than waste column-space, this linked 8-book list will bring the laggardliest laggard up to speed. Note that some of those books have been around for decades – the phrase ‘no excuse’ comes to mind. One comes to realise that of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, half are unattainable ex orders-of-magnitude population reduction, and one, No8 – is pure horsepoo.

One also realises something which invalidates much of the content of our four offerings; that measuring in an artificial proxy – money – is invalid. Money is merely fiat-levered debt; a forward bet that the future will deliver resources and energy. The general belief – that it is a store of ‘wealth’ - is mistaken; the penny drops when the penny drops, so to speak. This forced relating to the real world invalidates econo-speak words like ‘productivity’ (really energy efficiencies: the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics applies) and ‘growth’, which is exponential and thus, in a physical arena, temporary.

Now, with the above in mind…

Reviewing ‘Facing up to our Future’

Usefully, a point-precis is supplied for each chapter, and a suggested list of further reading follows each. It is an easy – albeit frustrating, to someone who owns all those linked books – read.

Tellingly, the first chapter is a Matt Nolan offering entitled ‘A Macroeconomic Balancing Act: Maintaining Wellbeing with Rising Fiscal Risk’. Of course, that isn’t the question at all; the heading should be: What level of wellbeing can we maintain ex resource draw-down? Supplementary question: For how many citizens?

Next comes Toby Moore with ‘Reconsidering the role of industrial policy as part of our policy toolkit’. I quote: ‘as governments pursue growth, resilience and security’ – an oxymoron the writer does not pursue. We are on to Chapter 5 before we leave economics enough to address the polycrisis.

Jonathan Boston penned Chapter 5, and his heading is absolutely correct: ‘We Need a Durable Social Contract to Tackle our Long-term Problems’. Indeed. We owe Boston in some ways; his (2009, from memory) paper on the Limits to Growth was a brave solo effort, and he has never wavered from the urging of a long focus. I first suggested to him, back at that Valuing Nature conference, that energy underwrote money. The point he missed then and apparently still misses (see below) is that if there is no, or less, available energy in the future, there will be no, or less, work done. Meaning there will be no, or less, money underwritten.

Extrapolated, that energy/money underwrite correlation (expanded to include finite resources, pollution and entropy) has made a small global echelon think further – astrophysicist Tom Murphy (UCAL) has articulated the end-point of that thinking better than most.

It is worth quoting a Murphy paragraph, to put Facing Up into context:

I began the Do the Math blog with a pair of posts about why growth can’t last—hitting limits in a historically short time. I also dedicate the first chapters of my textbook to the same topic. In 2022, I synthesized the arguments in an academic paper. This thread should be very familiar by now to my readers, and in fact really ought to be common knowledge. Yet, modernity still operates in a market economy and political system built around a growth expectation. Pension plans and social safety nets (like Social Security and Medicare) become Ponzi schemes unquestionably destined to fail at some point as growth falters.

Murphy’s full, free-download textbook is well worth the read.

What we are reading in the Clark Foundation offering, then, is largely well-meaning ideas to parry what are seen as the problems – but without fully framing the mega-predicament and its ramifications, first. In that light, Boston’s warning is valid; so too is Stuart McNaughton’s contribution, urging education to turn out thinkers, rather than bricks in the wall.

Greg Severinsen’s chapter (he works within EDS) urging tighter environmental regulations with hard limits, correct though that part is; misses the point that by the time we become truly sustainable (see the Murphy link) we don’t have current-form lawyers. Or laws. Or courts. Or enforcement – they’re all parts of modernity; like so many other activities they are children of a temporary energy surplus. But we will indeed – likely unpaid and locally – need to monitor and limit; Citizen Science beyond citizenry, so to speak.

One chapter (18: Infrastructure) close to the money was written by Kali Mercier, Deputy Director at HCF. I quote; ‘And yet New Zealand currently lacks a strategic infrastructure pipeline and a long-term population plan’ (my emphasis). ‘We are failing to invest in preparing for future challenges, meaning costly responses to crisis after crisis are likely to be the norm in the future’. We need to note – and bypass - the future-flawed economics-derived assumption (‘costly’; assuming funding, rather than ‘supplying materials and energy’) but strategic triage will, indeed, increasingly become the norm.

Editor Peter Davis writes: ‘We hope you enjoy the read, and that this collection clarifies the important issues New Zealanders and their governments must face up to.’ A clarification it is not; a conversation-starter it is.  

The Reality of Everything – a step up

Unsurprisingly, this effort was more on point; the link gives access to all the ‘expert’ speakers and lists a point-precis below each video.

Freshwater Ecologist Mike Joy kicked off – doing a good job of being a generalist rather than a specialist; laying out the big picture. En passant this shows up one of the visibly-emerging flaws in academia – there is no Systems overview; no meshing-in-proportion; someone had to step away from their silo.

One sentence stood out and is worth emphasising: ‘…we can’t buy our way out of ecological overshoot’. He made another crucial point; the way our food system is set up we are eating our way through fossil carbon – a temporary arrangement. His last point, that ‘decarbonisation alone will not solve the polycrisis’, was followed – somewhat ironically – by James Renwick addressing Climate.

Mahina-a-rangi Baker came next – discussing colonization. Recent guilt-assuaging in the First World has focused on the most recent domination-event (usually European over the most-recently-arrived local) but of course we are all a product of endless such overridings. Does that make them right? No. And what of our (via our current resource squandering) domination of future humans, of who there should be multiple generations? Colonialism is vertical as well as horizontal. Also, penultimate occupiers – in most cases – only had a smaller footprint because they had not discovered a high-quality energy-tapping mechanism. Their lower-energy/throughput lifestyles may be of some future use; that they chose to live that way from a fuller list of options, is unproven. Nonetheless it is a good bet that egalitarianism will be a better fit to degrowth, than any other societal format.

Distinguished Professor Robert McLachlan followed, somewhat out-of-silo, covering ‘energy’. Turned out more to be about climate and an energy transition – rather than about facing the polycrisis. His comment that we have to cease “within the next few decades” is perhaps optimistic and I would place him in the ‘electrify and party on’ camp, although he does make it clear we must live on less energy. Tantalizingly, he offered a link to someone else castigating the UN SDGs, including singling-out No8 - a rare insight.

On to Ganesh R. Ahirao and Morgan Edwards. The takeaway here, when one lays aside their (valid) criticism of neoliberal economics, was: ‘The real constraint on government spending is productive capacity, not money itself.’ That was a close as they got to the polycrisis. Hillmare Schulze (Berl) spoke on trade, and we can perhaps best sum her presentation up with a direct quote: ‘The goal should be resilience not efficiency. Trade policy should strengthen New Zealand’s ability to withstand shocks while supporting long-term economic security, regional resilience and community wellbeing.’

Our old acquaintance Boston came next, focusing on insurance and climate but still seeming to assume an all-else-being-equal BAU (business as usual). In fact, as the world retreats from the energy-input peak, so too will it retreat from maximum work-do-able. That in turn means there will be – or already was – a peak level of insurability. Put another way; modernity will increasingly be unable to insure itself (irrespective of climate) during the period of de-growth forced by a reduction in energy input.

Catherine Knight ended the (recorded) day, covering food-security and resilience. She was spot-on; her points irrefutable. Food is energy, and – unrealized by the majority as yet – the current system will not endure.

Conclusion

It is almost impossible to live sustainably, while being part of a greater society which isn’t; the rules of which are set up to self-promote. Moreover, most of the people featured here have enjoyed high-end first-world ‘incomes’, making them the biggest per-head consumers of the planet, that the planet has ever hosted. There will always be a whiff of hypocrisy; a dash of denial; a sprinkling of avoidance, from such sources.

There is also genuine ignorance: the taking-for-granted of the pronouncements of economists; the convolution of ‘environment’ with outright resource depletion; the inability to think (in Systems; laterally; logically; critically) being substituted by the (convenient?) acceptance of other siloed ‘experts’.

However, William Catton pointed out – in 1980, global population 4 billion – that we were already irretrievably overshot. Matters have not got better since, by some orders of magnitude. We face a real Polycrisis, not too far away – indeed many would argue that we are witnessing the beginnings of it, now. It is in that light that we must appraise these offerings. On that basis, The Reality of Everything, while short of ideal, outguns Facing Up by a goodly margin. If you have the time, it is worth the watch.

*Murray Grimwood comments on interest.co.nz as powerdownkiwi.