Sale Values

By Liza Field

12/15/2009

What's on sale, this late holiday-shopping season?

Everything! On a cash-strapped planet in liquidity crisis, bargains abound.

Like gold! With many personal stashes getting sold, and a resurgent gold rush around our planet, it's a deal many investors see as a hedge against the falling dollar.

Or how about cashmere? Once considered a luxury, bargain cashmere sweaters can now be bought by the stack at Wal-Mart.

Electronics-with their short shelf life-offer more great deals. And don't forget the energy to supply them-another relative bargain! As U.S. climate action remains vague, coal-burning facilities still send abundant power surging through our grid, for which human dollars pay only a fraction of the cost.

What pays for the rest? Well, the same currency-literally-that subsidizes all these bargains.

This currency has always underwritten humanity's survival needs. But it's paid a higher price for more-recent human conveniences-asphalt shopping plazas, road salts and lawn fertilizers, bargain furniture and beefsteaks.

It pays for sprawl, deforestation, gold -mining, carbon emissions, and the mountaintop-removal coal-mining currently powering my computer. It subsidizes the entire free market, which many conservatives say cannot afford to address global warming, because human dollars have never had to pay its true cost.

What currency does pay the price? Water - the one currency vital to life on the planet, it's the one we squander most freely for what is not life.

Like gold. As the mythical King Midas and Sir Thomas More observed, gold cannot feed or water life. Indeed, in Mongolia, a 20-year gold rush has depleted water and created famine.

Once a sustainable landscape, Mongolia is becoming a desert. A boom in cashmere demand, created by Chinese factories churning out low-cost sweaters for Western markets, led Mongolians to convert low-impact sheep flocks to cashmere goats. These goats are unsustainable, eating grass by the roots and destroying grazing lands.

The global recession then sank cashmere demand, leaving Mongolians stuck with destructive herds and scant cash. Now many herders themselves are ripping up grasslands in a desperate gold hunt. Giant mining corporations similarly plunder the land, leaving many rivers dried up, others poisoned with cyanide and mercury. The former herding economy is now impossible to revive.

"How unfortunate we are that we had gold in our land," said herder Dechindorj Ganbold. "Without gold, our rivers would flow and life would be normal."

Similar dismay is being voiced by natives and environmentalists in Alaska, where an international mining consortium plans to blast a pristine Bristol Bay headwaters wilderness into North America's largest gold mine.

Then we have my native Appalachians, storehouses of a blacker gold.

The idea here is that, for the sake of "the" economy, our ancient mountains must be blown up to extract coal as quickly and "cost-effectively" as possible.

The process shears off ecologically rare forest, blows up ridges and dumps tons of rubble (called "spoil") into mountain hollows, permanently burying ancient, vital creeks.

In 2003, the Bush administration "streamlined" permitting for these operations as a gift to the coal industry. Now under review by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, after six years of expedited destruction, mountaintop removal is still presented by the industry as "vital" to America's economy.

But how can an economy dependent on destroying life be "vital?" Such destruction ranks less as an "economy" than a raid by marauding vandals-whose damage must be paid for by whoever is "left behind."

This legacy bothers me as a Christian conservationist, puzzled by our "faith and values" broadcasters who oppose environmental protections. Biblically, Jesus is called a bringer of "life." And "living water"-considered a sacred gift-pours abundantly through scriptures.

So why are many "pro-life" Christian groups hostile, today, to environmental protections?

Political-business strategists like Ralph Reed help to explain it. Before hiring out his services to big energy corporations (including the former Enron), Reed was the neoconservative strategist tapped by Pat Robertson to create the Christian Coalition, in 1989.

Leaving his post there for private consulting work, Reed took his powerful Christian contact list with him, and has been using it for a decade to organize Christian opposition to the environmental protections his big oil, gas and energy clients oppose.

Fortunately, other Christian groups-and Jews, Buddhists, Taoists, people of many religions and none-aren't sold on these industrialized values, but are insisting on protections for water, climate, and a living planet they see as a holy gift to revere, not plunder.

This is the conversion our times call for-not the converting of life into gold, or mountains into spoil, or religious leaders into false profits-but conversion of a system that placed life at the service of the market, to one of higher values, whose market actually serves life.