Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

late-night thoughts about democracy S 81
quality. It takes time to make a great city. It takes time to
restore soil. It takes time to restore one’s soul. In each case,
speed distorts reality and destroys the harmonies of nature and
society alike (Orr, 1998). Hurry certainly changes society for
the worse.
Ivan Illich’s provocative 1974 book Energy and Equity makes
the case that “high quanta of energy degrade social relations
just as inevitably as they destroy the physical milieu” (1974, p. 3).
“Beyond a critical speed,” Illich argued, “no one can save time
without forcing another to lose it” (p. 30). But any proposal to
limit speed “engenders stubborn opposition . . . expos[ing] the
addiction of industrialized men to consuming ever higher doses
of energy” (p. 55). Even assuming nonpolluting energy sources,
the use of massive energy of any sort “acts on society like a drug
that is . . . psychically enslaving” (p. 6). The irony, Illich says, is that
the time it takes to earn the money to travel at high speed divided
into the average miles traveled per year gives a fi gure of about
15 mph . . . about the average speed of travel in the year 1900, but
at considerably higher cost.
What does a slow economy look like? Woody Tasch, chairman
of Investors’ Circle, offers one view: “It would be driven by . . . the
imperatives of nature rather than by the imperatives of fi nance.
Its fi rst principle would be, I suppose, the principle of carrying
capacity, embedded in a process of nurturing” (2008, p. 175). A slow
money economy would change the way we invest and discipline
the expectations of quick returns to capital to, say, 5 to 8 percent
per year, which now sounds pretty good. It would require buyers,
for example, to hold stock for, say, six months before they could
sell. Tasch calls this “patient capital,” but by any name it involves
the recalibration of money and fi nance to the pace of nature. And
that would be a revolution.
My third suggestion is to build an economy on ecological
realities, not on the belief that we are exempt from the
laws of ecology and physics. In his classic 1980 book Overshoot,
William Catton writes “The alternative to chaos is to
abandon the illusion that all things are possible” (p. 9). He
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