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Panelists connect issues of faith and economics
Feb. 03, 2010
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Partha Dasgupta (photo by Leo Sorel)
Printer-friendly versionSend to friendPDF versionNEW YORK
Franciscan Sr. Kathie Uhler has for months been working on a series of panel presentations to the United Nations that will show the damage exploitative mining has had on the indigenous populations of countries like Peru, Papua New Guinea and Indonesia.
As Uhler has learned in her research, inhabitants of an area are often unaware of mining–for gems, coal, or oil–that is taking place a short distance from their homes, perhaps on a mountaintop, until natural resources have already been polluted. In many cases, she said, the governments of countries where this mining occurs have allowed companies to do the work without alerting area residents or giving them a choice in the matter.
"You have a microcosm, in mining, of what's happening to the whole earth," said Uhler, one of about 400 attendees at the Trinity Institute's recent "Building an Ethical Economy" conference, a three-day event inside the vaulted chapel of the Episcopalian Trinity Church here on Wall Street and included remarks from Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams of Canterbury, England, and Kathryn Tanner, theology professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
She said the panel discussions, which blended economics, ethics, theology and environmental responsibility, have helped focus her upcoming project, on which she is collaborating with a number of organizations.
"They helped me to put in my own language this huge thing that's happening and where we go from here," Uhler said. "You can't really put dollars and cents on water and aquifers–these things belong to everyone."
Uhler said the panel discussions helped her better understand the relationship between faith and economics, and "forced me to think about how the gospel that I profess to live helps me to address the economic problems of the day." She took particular interest in one panelist's explanation of wealth as it relates to natural resources: 
Partha Dasgupta (photo by Leo Sorel), economics professor at Cambridge University's St. John's College.
"Are humanity's dealings with nature sustainable?" Dasgupta asked the audience at the start of his presentation. He said there is convincing evidence that continued exploitation of this natural capital–ocean fisheries, river estuaries, aquifers, tropical forests and ecosystems in general–will result in its changing "dramatically, for the worse, with little advance notice."
"There isn't just one environmental problem," he continued, tracing the issues from the sphere of environmental conservation to those of politics and macroeconomics. "There's a large collection of them," manifesting themselves on different scales and operating at different speeds.
One example he offered is the fact that GDP does not account for the depletion of natural resources.
"It doesn't deduct the depreciation of capital that accompanies production, in particular it doesn't deduct depreciation of natural capital," he said, as if the value of natural capital were negligible.
When markets function adequately, prices of capital reflect its worth, he said. Why, then, are the prices of natural capital below their actual social worth?
It could be that the markets for a particular type of natural capital do not work well, or that the economic negotiations are taking place over vast distances–as in the effect upland deforestation has on downstream fishing and farming-but each case of "underpriced" natural capital points to a failure along the way to secure "property rights" for natural resources.
There is a contrast between the market price of a particular thing and its "shadow price," which Dasgupta described as an asset's social worth, something more difficult to quantify.
"What value should we place on the blue whale, for example?" he asked.
One consequence resulting from natural resources' being priced below their actual value is that there is little incentive to conserve or economize them, he concluded, adding that the question leads to the "deepest quest in the social sciences"–the question of establishing grace and decency among "wide and disparate groups of people."
David Kane, of Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns, said people do not see the destruction of nature in their day-to-day lives.
"It all just shows up in the stores to us," said Kane, who is based in Washington, D.C. and working with the Maryknoll coalition Faith, Ecology, and the Global Economy to raise awareness of these issues and bring them to Congress.
"What we're trying to do is bring economy and ecology together," Kane said, recalling Dasgupta's description of the conflict between economic growth and preservation of nature.
Kane said he would like to see a shift toward "an economy that doesn't depend on growth," he said, but "we're not anywhere close to that."
Conference webcasts are available at www.trinitywallstreet.org.
According to Genesis, God
According to Genesis, God gave "man" dominion over animals and gave us plants to eat...it doesn't say God gave us animals and plants and earth to ravage beyond our real needs...
If an economy that doesn't
If an economy that doesn't depend on growth is not in the seeable future, how about an economy built on renewal. That would employ technology, reasonable acquisition and commitment to renew the face of the earth.
What a hopeful article to see
What a hopeful article to see that sustainability is being discussed in terms of economy, ecology and theology. An excellent article addressing issues like "actual value of a product" and talking about an economy that doesn't depend on growth. We need to wean ourselves of our consumer economy, something we really need to do or we will drown in our own trash. We don't fully understand the value of water, of clean air, of uncontaminated soil. We take so much for granted and as a result have dimished the value of the very elements that make life possible.
all those nominal christians
all those nominal christians who really worship capitalism aren't going to like this.
Questions??.....please give
Questions??.....please give me some light about this...
1.no where do i see the impact of over population on these issses?
2.how many tree are cut for housing per new person born?
3.how much land to cultivate for food for one person in a life time?
4.how much water does someone consume if live to 60?
5.how much waste does one person produce in living to 60?
6.etc., etc.....
7.how many orphans in Haiti before the quake? is having many children
the recreational outlet for the poor?....note the over population in
africa,etc....resulting in women and children bearing the suffering..
men seem to get a pass.....do so called "organizations" talk about
birth control....???
8.all the money to Haiti via UN and US aid...and no road system, one tower
at the airport...over the last 15 yrs...where was the infrastructure
support or demand for all that money....i asked a former diplomat..were does
all the money go...?? the reply was "nice homes with swimming pools"?? i
would love to see the spread sheets of salaries, where all the money
went, etc....... how many UN people there and where did all that UN
money go...these are real questions...and who do we hold responsible?
9.where did all the money go that was donated to all the thousands of
so called "charitable organizations" that so many sent donations to in
Haiti over the past yrs and other parts of the world..???
What on earth would be an
What on earth would be an "economy that doesn't depend on growth"? Actually, I suppose I know the answer to that question. An economy that does not depend on growth would be one like North Korea...an economy that does not grow as the population grows, and an economy that cannot sustain its people. On the other hand, I suppose it is also an economy that does not place a great deal of strain on natural resources...what does it produce after all?
Standard progressive behavior, though, Take problems to Congress, get laws and regulation passed. Don't bother to appeal to the markets, don't bother trying to CONVINCE people to purchase ecologically sound products and CONVINCE businesses and entrepreneurs to shift toward ecologically sound methods of production and manufacture. Why bother trying to convince people and businesses when we can simply have government pass a law and impose regulation?
Meanwhile, I would remind those who blame free market capitalism for all the ecological ills of the planet that the Communist Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact nations were among the worst ecological offenders in history, caring not at all for what their state did to the environment. It is thanks to the enormous success of free market capitalism, the fact that free markets have freed us from the necessity of spending all out time searching for food, clothing and shelter that we can spend time and energy working on improving the environment.
From all eternity and for all
From all eternity and for all eternity God the Father utters one infinite Word: B'ni, that is, My Son. That Word is his Son, Jesus Christ, Our Lord, and also the world in which we live, and also the cosmos of which the world is part. If we believe that Jesus Christ is our Lord, then, we will treat His body with the same respect and reverence as we treat the Eucharist, not by waiting for the multinational companies to mend their ways, but by doing wht each of us can, living simply, recycling what we can no longer use, and encouraging by our example, and (if that fails) by our words, the fellow members of our church--the local church, in which cathlicity resides (after all the Roman Catholic Church suffers from the defects of a multinational organisation, too). It does not require power, since Christ showed by his life and death yhat god does not deal in power, but it requires will, our wills, to stand up for Him who is contuing to be crucified again by those who are complicit, even if only by their silence, in the work of those who damage our planet. Our response to the Father's B'ni is Abba, as the New and Old Testaments tell us. We need utter our response not only on one day a week, but by everything we do every hour of every day of our lives.
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