From Household Budgets to Saving the Planet
It’s good to save, right? For example, it is wise and responsible as to ‘save for a rainy day’. If you have the means, it may well be prudent to do so. It makes sense to increase your income in comparison to your outgoings, how much you earn in comparison to how much you spend, your input against your outputs. But your household budget does not exist in a vacuum outside of banks, governments, and everyone else’s transactions. This ‘everything else’ is what is often called or reified as “the economy”. And it’s a commonly parroted belief that the economy functions like your household budget, just a scaled-up version. However, it does not.
“Money is debt. Banknotes are just so many circulating IOUs... Pounds are either circulating government debt, or they’re created by banks by making loans. That’s where money comes from. Obviously if nobody took out any loans at all, there wouldn’t be any money. The economy would collapse.” (Graeber 2015)
In other words, if you actually ran the economy the way you run a prudent household budget with savings, then most people’s actual households’ budget would go into debt. The point here being that a certain habit of thinking (prudence) and activity (saving) has been mistakenly extended from the micro to the macro, the household to the national, the local to the global.
So what about saving the planet? This same habit of thinking appears, extending itself yet again, despite the fact that we know the initial extension is mistaken. We went from household budget to economy, but now we also extend the economy to the planetary ecosystem. Again, outputs should not exceed inputs. One part is to be saved whilst the other part is spent. In the case of ‘nature’ this is called wild and domesticated, save one and spend the other. For example, you have 10 acres of monkey laden forest. You could save it, or you could log it and raise 1000 cattle on it. A tug of war ensues between save versus spend, until it is decided, for instance, that you can save 5 acres of rainforest and raise 500 cattle, more intensively, on the remaining 5 acres.
For those interested in the peculiarities of such budgeting, in the native language of this tug of war, to decide what is prudent means talking about natural capital, wildlife conservation, net-zero, and ecosystem services. Once it has been decided what is to be saved or spent, then the activity of saving begins with the practices of protected areas, expelling people, killing invasive species etcetera. But wait, this is not all. This habit of thinking and the related actions do not stop there.
Human population is increasing, whilst the rest of life on the planet — ‘nature’ — is on a finite budget. More people must mean more acres will be spent, so it follows that there will be less wild unless there is growth in more intensive exploitation of what remains in the budget to be spent. The premise then is that life is finite while humans are by default exploitative, and this premise is expressed in ideas of sustainability or sustainable development, drawing on economics and management theory.
An answer to how to manage this balance between wild and domesticated, saveable and spendable, inputs and outputs emerges from a tension between two positions. First is the belief in infinite progress, economic growth, and green growth. The second is a post-structuralist recognition of limits to growth and, in some cases, degrowth (Mitcham 1995). These are both different ways to overcome the problem of what to save and what can be spent.
This tension reflects different epistemologies, or ways of knowing. Post-structuralists understood that there was no perfect truth at the end of the scientific tunnel, and that methods of observation do not produce an objective representation of reality. Instead, there is just corrupted power relations. Meanwhile, believers in linear progress and linear growth — positivists — maintained a belief in being able to know the planet in its objectivity. In Graeber’s analysis, both parties:
“…tend to agree that if there were a real world independent of the subject, it should be possible (at least in principle) for the subject to have absolute and comprehensive knowledge of it.” (2015)
Furthermore, there is agreement that underlying ‘life’ there is effectively an economic logic of savings vs spending. For the post-structuralists Graeber argues:
“The idea was always to unmask the hidden structures of power, dominance, and exploitation that lay below even the most mundane and ordinary aspects of daily life. Certainly such things are there to be found. But if this is all one is looking for, one soon ends up with a rather jaundiced picture of social reality. The overall effect of reading through this literature is remarkably bleak; one is left with the… feeling of a fallen world, in which every aspect of human life is threaded with violence and domination…” (2001)
In doing so, leading theorists such as Bourdieu ended up theorising ‘economic capital’ and ‘symbolic capital’. In other words, the world is so terribly corrupted by power that it really is reduced to savings and spending. As Bourdieu argues, we must:
“…extend economic calculation to all the goods, material and symbolic, without distinction, that present themselves as rare and worthy of being sought after in a particular social formation — which may be ‘fair words’ or smiles, handshakes or shrugs, complements or attention, challenges or insults, honour or honours, powers or pleasures, gossip or scientific information, distinction or distinctions, etc” (in Graeber 2001)
So, from the perspective of this seeming tension between progress or growth and limits to it, there is in fact an agreement on a habit of thinking in terms of savings versus spendings. On top of this, both place a kind of end on time. The post-structuralists are “making power and domination so fundamental to the very nature of social reality that it became impossible to imagine a world without it”. In other words, there is no future, there is only dismantling or putting limits on the present. Whilst the positivists hold fast to the idea that the past has progressed to this present and this present, in terms of the planet, is basically knowable in its totality, with an unknown future into which we can grow.
Post-structuralists “phrasing everything in largely negative terms and tone” (Mitcham 1995) provided some recognition of a limit to progressive growth, which turned their tension with positivists from a recognition of what should not be done, into a question of what should be done better, i.e. sustainable development. Humans should appropriately measure this ‘progressed’ present, and then define our inputs and outputs to at least sustain our present achievements.
This brings us back to the habit of extending the household budget to the economy, to the ecosystem. Because sustainable development not only emerges from thinking in terms of saved versus exploited, but it creates that ‘end on time’ by juxtaposing the present against the past as a movement from wild toward domesticated. This juxtaposition is the mythological basis that humankind and other animals once existed in a ‘state of nature’, then suddenly around 10,000 years ago:
“…we find our imaginary human actors scattered across the world’s continents, beginning to farm their own crops and raise their own herds. Whatever the local reasons… the effects are momentous, and basically the same everywhere. Territorial attachments and private ownership of property become important in ways previously unknown, and with them, sporadic feuds, and war. Farming grants a surplus of food, which allows some to accumulate wealth and influence beyond their immediate kin-group…To make matters more difficult still, or so the story goes, farming ensures a global rise in population levels.” (Graeber and Wengrow 2018)
In sum, the domestication of nonhuman wildlife enabled the domestication of human wildlife and its growth. The idea of being a civilized human, sustainable and developed, is harnessed to domestication as exploitation, with domestication providing the necessary resources to sustain growth and civilization, because ‘nature’ is finite.
The concepts of wild and domesticated, then, breathe life into the theory of linear progression from one to the other, establishing the premises of the linear progression of social evolution and that this necessarily/inevitably involves exploitative domestication of wildlife. However, this is not a fact. At its simplest we know wild to domesticated is not a one-way process, and even at a microscopic level, evolution is not linear. More importantly, though, the whole dichotomy is unhelpful. We have archaeological records of many ways of farming, “other than European-style farming”, that have been diminutively described as foraging and gathering (Graeber and Wengrow, 2021).
We also have the works of environmental anthropology, ethnobotany, and environmental history that have recorded many ways of life that don’t fit into this wild past and domesticated present dichotomy. But most importantly, there are many indigenous and peasant farmers today whose work also does not fit in this dichotomy, often described instead as agroecology, land justice, and food autonomy (food sovereignty).
Just one example that expresses the difference between saving or spending and other ways of farming comes from looking a herring in Alaska (Thornton et al. 2010). The sustainable development of fisheries there, via the idea of maximum sustainable yield, has been a failure compared to a local cosmology of environmental relations that has been suppressed. The other way of sea farming by the Tlingit speaking people does not pretend to be able to surveil and objectively know life in order to work out how it can be sustainably harvested in terms of how much can be saved vs exploited. Nor does it pretend by contrast that all knowledge is purely subjective power play. Instead, it’s based on leaving the herring to be autonomous, but making gifts to them that help them thrive, creating regional trophic cascades that people and other sea creatures can enjoy.
In conclusion, I want to draw attention to the Marxist suggestion that we do not need to be reminded that human society depends on nature, and that the remarkable thing is that we have built it on other grounds. This needs an important update: Our habits of thinking about what it means to be a civilized human are built on how we think about nature and its related actions. If we take Marx’s point, that:
"…ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas" (1845)
Then habits of thinking are what structure a civilization, and these habits are nothing more than an idealised expression of dominant material relationships that benefit those who rule that civilization. And the idea they reproduce is natural order, where ‘natural’ is rooted in habits of thinking about human-environmental relations as wild, domesticated, exploitative and civilized.
These formal abstractions reflect the natural order not just in terms of human-human relations but also human-environmental relations, where the latter justifies the former and the consequent ways in which wildlife is saved, human-environmental change and continuity are sustainably developed and so forth. In sum, how we think about natural order provides justification for how we think of our social order as natural. But, domestication does not have to be exploitative, nor does the environment determine social relations.
AVI (DR. KBH)
Teacher of global public health, researcher of landwork systems, roleplayer, demon summoner, cook of many tasty things.