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DV: And, as you might also know—I made a few reference materials—that actually the topic is quite old, so, it was already discussed after the Second World War, after the New Deal, and from different perspectives, actually, we should be actually careful that the universal basic income is discussed not just among the left but also among conservatives and neoliberals, so it’s so many approaches which we should be really careful about and actually study them carefully, but what I would like to suggest today, it’s just a full—I hope you might read the announcement of this assembly—that I suggest the speculation that the universal basic income as be considered as a form of a gift, and gift is a very heavy concept, also very ambivalent with different approaches—and—but what is important about gift, to just generalize, it’s actually an obvious radical alternative to the capitalist mode of production, because the way, how the economy of the gift—and actually we often speak about the “gift economy”, not about “the gift”—is also part of that very subtle—sometimes very brutal—economic relation between not just individuals but among collectives, so among a group of people, like a tribe—like it was in archaic cultures, or, among possibility—like—I speculate that actually the basic income can be also considered as a kind of—also—a gift. And who provides us with a gift? Society? Or is it just a share in that common economy in which we all create common goods which we all create together? So let's open the issue—for me that's why actually today with us is Oxana Timofeeva, our old comrade from our collective Chto Delat who actually wrote a whole book about Georges Bataille, and actually they did a few seminars on the gift economy in Russia—Moscow—and I hope she will share with us your vision, and at the end of my introduction I also would like to say is that actually, the old kind of dream of emancipation from labor, from that hard, monotone woes—bureaucratic way of making our living—this is really through—and we feel exhausted, collapsing, precarious beings who are really lost, and universal basic income, it sounds like a legitimate answer—“okay, so we get out of that dream of necessity and jump and make a qualitative leap into the room of freedom”. Sounds incredibly great, but at the same time I would feel that there is kind of traps inside of that kind of utopian vision, and to make a true utopia we should be really very sensitive and cautious about that possibility. So, and, all my questions—and ‘specially I'm also speaking outside of so-called afternoon society which actually we have inside of the Institute of Radical Imagination Discussion, it’s actually kind of likely that a lot of affluent countries like Netherlands, Finland, probably Spain already start that experiment in different forms, and if you speak with economists you can see that there is kind of minimal basic income or utopian basic income, and calculations in the article which I shared with you against basic income that was actually quite heavy in economic analysis, what it is, and in our situation I also see that if we consider that maybe some country’s more advanced—so—like with the Industrial Revolution—so—it might create certain global inequalities where art is supported with better possibilities of getting support—it's already there—because you know how Western art is the period with different economies and funds and people who are outside, who have no access to that kind of support, so, and that for me is also a quite serious issue: how we would imagine a certain form of international institution which might redistribute a certain form of global or national support, and transform into some kind of international solidarity.

Bataillean ecology, then, would force a choice conscious of the constraints of opportunity cost: when capital growth touches natural limits, capital burns up, catastrophically. Thus, a society must choose either to endure this burning or set fire to its wealth beforehand. That is, destroying wealth costs a society the opportunity for capital growth. Even though a Bataillean ecology would accept the growth of capital as good and the waste of capital as evil, it would choose evil. There is no transvaluation of values here.

Bataille extended his advocacy of practices of unproductive expenditure from his early writings into his later ones, from prose-poems to rigorous, if not systematic treatises, first as a means of fighting fascism, then as a means of staving off nuclear holocaust. Scholars of Bataillean ecology extend his ideas further still to the task of stunting material growth. This work depends on embracing Bataille's phenomenology of the scientific world (‘I picture the Earth projected into space, like a woman screaming with her head on fire’), and his characterization of eroticism as a volcanic sacrifice of excess wealth. One must keep these images in mind when addressing the science of sustainability and the practical programs that such research enjoins, if one wishes to hew to the course of environmental prudence. It is of some benefit that in the very origins of contemporary sustainability research, there already appears a slight reflection of these visions.

Bataille's analysis of capitalist-democracies is cursory, presumably because he condemns them as a short-lived phenomenon, which will inevitably give way to other forms of political organization (P 198). This damning judgment stems from two arguments that relate to the genesis of a capitalist spirit that is hostile to unproductive expenditure. In the first, he follows Max Weber in crediting the Protestant Reformation with a decisive role in shaping the capitalist spirit (AS 123). In the Middle-Ages, Catholicism masterfully manipulated the desire for squandering by institutionalizing indulgences and other forms of buying spiritual credit, and by spending its prodigious wealth lavishly on churches that were packed with awe-inspiring but otherwise useless ornaments (AS 122). Nobles and merchants felt obliged to match this spectacular expenditure, creating an ostentatious equilibrium (AS 122). When Luther insisted on "the Gospel's principle of hostility to wealth and luxury" he drove the imposition of a moral code opposing excess and squandering (AS 121). This destroyed "the world of unproductive consumption" and obliterated the remnants of religion's sacred appeal (AS 127). In the second argument, Bataille claims that capitalist-democracies emerged from revolutions awash in antiauthoritarian fervour, including hostility towards institutions that have traditionally tapped into sacred desire, notably the monarchy, church, and the military (PF 158). This atmosphere fostered the rise of the bourgeoisie, a ruling class peerless in their hatred of expenditure, who are unwilling to fulfil their "obligation" to expend part of their wealth gloriously (AS 124–5). Capitalism is, then, an "unreserved surrender to things", a "metamorphosis" in the "civilized world" where future accumulation is prioritized over present desires (AS 136/LE 55). Democratic politicians are merely spokespeople for the world of work, competing with rival plans for economic efficiency.

Ignorance of sacred forces is, for Bataille, politically catastrophic. Not only does it reflect a lack of awareness of the experiences that make human existence meaningful, but it also exposes society to the explosive release of repressed forces. Many commentators have emphasised Bataille's concern that the decline in spectacular festivals under bourgeois capitalism will lead to an excess of sacred desire and surplus resources being invested into imperialistic adventures and catastrophic wars on a scale hitherto unimagined. Another consequence of societies neglecting sacred desire is that they become increasingly vulnerable to the challenge posed by charismatic leaders who establish otherness to the world of work. This increases the likelihood of populist movements and exposes society to the extreme expression of this tendency: the risk of fascist coups.

15.4 Energetic Ethics Bataille’s economic thought has an ethical character inasmuch as it addresses what he calls the “failure of humanity” (Bataille 2007, 15) to take heed of the general economy. In exclusively adhering to the restricted economy and thus solely addressing energy in terms of its efficient production, humanity becomes increasingly exposed to the abundant influx and pressure of the general economy. As with any living system, this causes expansion. But where the logic of the restricted economy celebrates such expansion under the heading of economic growth, Bataille stresses that all growth must eventually run out of space. When this happens, pressure builds up, and like any limited system that is subjected to increasing pressure, it finally explodes. Writing in the aftermath of two world wars which he understands as “the greatest orgies of wealth that history has recorded” (Bataille 1991, 37), Bataille imagines—with Argus’ eyes—the eruption of another war as the explosive and catastrophic outcome of (or rather outlet for) uncontainable pressure. As with other constituents of the general economy, “the impossibility of continuing growth makes way for squander” (Bataille 1991, 29), which in the case of forgetful human existence takes the catastrophic form of war. For Bataille therefore, the failure of neglecting the general economy “causes us to undergo what we could bring about in our own way” (Bataille 1991, 23). This failure evidently concerns ethics, and Bataille explicitly aims to find better ways of dealing with excess energy, of “exhausting the surplus without war” (Bataille 2007, 428). In exploring cultural history, he famously finds examples of pressure exhausts in the ritual of potlach, where the indigenous people in the American northwest wasted surplus energy by way of the destruction of accumulated and produced resources, for instance by wrecking one’s canoes, up to setting one’s own village on fire (Bataille 1991, 67–68). Other examples include pyramids as an energetically inefficient burial method (119), Lamaist monks who avoided activity in contemplative life, thus dissipating the surplus generated by Tibetan workers (Bataille 1991, 93–110), jewels, works of art (Bataille 1989; Wendlin 2007, 39), and most eminently eroticism (Bataille 1986, 2007). All of these indicate a different approach to energy: rather than considering it a scarce good to be accumulated and put to work, they acknowledge rather than forget its constitutive abundance, accordingly attesting to how “it is not necessity but its contrary, ‘luxury’ that presents living matter and mankind with their fundamental problems” (Bataille 1991, 12). For Bataille, such luxury is a fundamental ethical problem, given how refraining from burning off (178 J. Zwier and V. Blok) excess energy eventually causes humanity to undergo its catastrophic dissipation in war.

The Need for a Theory of General Economy Before unpacking the nature and implications of non-productive expenditure, it is first necessary to explain more fully what George Bataille means by ‘general economy’ and why he thinks it is an important, and unacknowledged, field of study. Bataille notes in Volume 1 of The Accursed Share that while there might be some simple activities, like the ploughing of a field, that can be easily imagined in isolation from the rest of the world, as soon as we start to think on a larger scale this kind of subdivision becomes impossible. Bataille diagnoses the failure of most theories of political economy as emerging from a related narrow sightedness: economists tend to think of the economy of a country, or even the entire world, as being an aggregation of hypothetically subdivisible activities and events. As such, theorists of economics, in Bataille’s estimation, tend to miss patterns and laws that are visible only when economy is assessed at its most general level. Crucially, for Bataille, this most general level of economy includes causes and events which would never be noticed or deemed relevant by the specialized economist. Bataille writes: “In overall industrial development, are there not social conflicts and planetary wars? In the global activity of men, in short, are there not causes and effects that will appear only provided that the general data of the economy are studied?” (Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volume 1) Above all, the kinds of events and practices Bataille wants to bring into view of political economy are wars, religious practices (and especially sacrifices), and sexual practices. Expanding the field of political economy to that of ‘general economy’ also inflects Bataille’s thinking with a biological component: the contemplation of human societies as continuous with, or analogous to, organic ones. The investment of monetary wealth in the growth of an economic system becomes just one instance of a more general pattern. Bataille then goes on to suggest that in all these systems, some portion of the wealth generated cannot be usefully spent: “The living organism, in a situation determined by the play of energy on the surface of the globe, ordinarily receives more energy than is necessary for maintaining life; the excess energy (wealth) can be used for the growth of a system (e.g., an organism); if the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be completely absorbed in its growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically.” (Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volume 1)

Besides being a recipe for labour inefficiency and labour market distortions, tending to displace workers employed in the ‘free’ labour market and to depress their wages, the job guarantee proposal fails to recognise that today’s crisis is structural and requires transformative policies. Tax credits, job guarantees and statutory minimum wages would barely touch the precariat’s existential insecurity that is at the heart of the social and economic crisis, let alone address the aspirations of the progressive and growing part of the precariat for an ecologically grounded Good Society.136 The emphasis on jobs is non-ecological, since it is tied to the constant pursuit of economic growth. There are many instances, support for fracking and for the third runway at Heathrow airport being recent examples, where the promise of more jobs has trumped costs to health and the environment. And a job guarantee policy could have a strong appeal to the political right as a way to dismantle the welfare state. Why pay unemployment benefits if everybody has a guaranteed job? In the USA, one 75 conservative commentator chortled that ‘over 100 federal welfare programs would be replaced with a single job guarantee program.’137 Finally, there is what this writer regards as the policy’s worst feature. It would reinforce twentieth-century labourism, by failing to make the distinction between work and labour. Those who back guaranteed jobs typically ignore all forms of work that are not paid labour. A really progressive agenda would strengthen the values of work over the dictates of labour. It would seek to enable more people to develop their own sense of occupation.138 A job is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Economists tend to be inconsistent in this respect. In the textbooks, labour has ‘disutility’; it is negative for the worker. Yet many economists who use or write these textbooks then advocate putting everybody in jobs. Why make a fetish of ‘jobs’? A job is doing ‘labour’ for others. What about all the forms of work that we do for those we love or for our community or for ourselves? Many forms of work that are not labour are more rewarding psychologically and socially. A regime of putting everybody into jobs, in unchosen activities, would be orchestrated alienation. Surely a progressive should want to minimise the time we spend in stultifying and subordinated jobs, so that we can increase the time and energy for forms of work and leisure that are self-chosen and oriented to personal and community development. There is one last point, to do with the claim that a job guarantee would be politically popular. Much is made of a US poll which asked people whether they would support a scheme to guarantee a job for anybody ‘who can’t find employment in the private sector’, if paid from a 5% tax on those earning over $200,000. The result was 52% in favour. Supporters thought this was ‘stunning’.139 With such a loaded question, one should be stunned by the bare-majority support. After all, most respondents were being told they would not have to pay, and that there were no alternative jobs available, an unlikely scenario. Rather than jobs per se, the primary challenge is to build a new income distribution system, recognising that the old one has broken down irretrievably. The rentiers are running away with all the revenue thrown up by rentier capitalism, and real wages will continue to lag. Putting people into static low-wage jobs is no response.

A job guarantee would be a recipe for perpetuating low productivity. What would happen if a person in a guaranteed job performed poorly, perhaps because of limited ability or simply because they knew it was ‘guaranteed’? If you are guaranteed a job, why bother to work hard? If you are an employer and are given a subsidy to pay employees guaranteed a job, why bother to try to use labour efficiently? If subsidised through tax credits or a wage subsidy, a worker would need to produce only a little more value than the cost to the employer to make it profitable to retain him or her. This would cheapen low-productivity jobs relative to others and inhibit the higher productivity arising from labour-displacing technological change. If a job of a certain type is guaranteed, what happens if an employer wishes to invest in technology that would remove the need for such jobs? Those calling for a job guarantee also ignore the fact that any market economy requires some unemployment, as people need time to search for jobs they are prepared to accept, and firms must sift applicants for jobs they want to have done. To adopt a job guarantee policy would risk putting the economy in gridlock. Job guarantee advocates, such as Larry Summers, President Clinton’s former Treasury Secretary, argue that people without jobs ‘are much more likely to be dissatisfied with their lives’ and are more likely to be drug addicts and abusive than those with even low-wage jobs.135 This is bogus. I suggest there would be no correlation between life satisfaction and having a job if the comparison was made between those in lousy jobs and those with no job but an adequate income on which to live. Somebody facing a choice between penury and a lousy job will prefer the job. But that does not mean they like or want it for itself. The polling company Gallup conducts regular State of the Global Workplace surveys in over 150 countries. In 2017, it found that globally only 15% of workers were engaged by their job, and in no country did the figure exceed 40%. One recent UK survey found that 37% of jobholders did not think their job made any significant contribution. Summers ends his article by equivocating – ‘the idea of a jobs guarantee should be taken seriously but not literally’. He seems to mean government should try to promote more employment, through ‘wage subsidies, targeted government spending, support for workers with dependants, and more training and job-matching programmes’. In other words, he reverts to the standard social democratic package that has not done very well in the past three decades.

An employer normally pays an employee because the latter is doing something of value. Under a federal job guarantee, that logic is reversed: the government must find something for ten million or more workers to do because they are being paid. The difference is of great importance. The work handed out under a job guarantee is subject to complex criteria. In the view of the Levy report, these jobs must • Be able to “quickly accommodate new entrants into the program and let them go without disruption should they find alternative employment” • Help low-skilled workers build human capital to “enhance their chances to obtain work outside the program. They will gain work experience as well as on-the-job training.” • In every community, “provide visible benefits, meeting specific local needs” • Put millions to work “without competing for employees or displacing private sector undertakings” or “conventional public-sector work” These points, taken together, are astonishing.14 The work given to enrollees must teach valuable skills, but not so valuable that someone securely employed in the private sector would want to enroll. And while the work needs to result in “visible benefits,” these benefits should not be so great that any firm or government agency would be willing on its own to pay a wage of fifteen dollars per hour.15 The Levy report’s authors see concerns about finding such work as a failure of imagination: Is there really a dearth of useful things that might be done by our unemployed workers? Have we become so blind that we cannot see our failing infrastructure, our understaffed parks with their closed swimming pools and unkempt trails, the unmet needs of our seniors and our children, our polluted ponds and streams that require cleanup, and our low-income housing that would benefit from repairs and insulation? Are we really so unimaginative that we cannot think of a way to match our jobless with paid work tackling the unmet tasks surrounding us? Beyond examples such as these, both reports leave the job guarantee’s implementation, and its feasibility, to the reader’s imagination. The remainder of this section will consider the logistical details of finding and assigning work to over ten million people without the aid of the market, while also meeting the above criteria. While largescale, centralized proposals can sound good in the abstract, even scratching the surface of the logistics involved shows how they quickly break down, sometimes catastrophically.

The standard argument against degrowth First, note that the typical argument against degrowth, which I laid out in a Bloomberg post a while back, is that we don’t need it; we can raise human living standards without exhausting the planet. This argument was capably put forward by Andy McAfee, in his excellent book More From Less, which you should buy and read. Essentially, the idea that economic growth requires growth in resource use is false; rich countries have started to grow while using less and less of the planet’s most important resources. For example, here is U.S. use of fresh water and various metals, as well as trade-adjusted carbon emissions So the idea here is that we don’t need degrowth; instead, we can keep raising everyone’s standard of living without exhausting the planet’s resources. Because growth doesn’t just mean using more and more stuff; instead, it can mean finding more efficient ways to use the stuff we have. Degrowthers have two counters to this. Their first counter, typically, is to show a graph of resource use for the entire world, and show that it’s correlated with global growth. This is a weak response, for two reasons: Degrowthers have no idea how to combine various resources into an overall measure of resource use, so they typically go with gross weight. This is absurd, since some materials are recyclable and others are not — if you “use” a ton of copper you still have the copper, whereas if you “use” a ton of oil, your oil is gone. It’s also absurd because it doesn’t take into account the relative abundance of resources — if you figure out how to substitute 2 tons of sand for 1 ton of oil, you’re getting more efficient, since sand is much more plentiful than oil (and doesn’t pollute as much when you use it). A lot of growth is figuring out how to substitute plentiful resources for rare ones, and simply adding up gross tonnage ignores this. Past trends are no guarantee of future trends. Until the 70s, for instance, U.S. economic growth was closely correlated with both energy use and carbon emissions; after the 70s, this correlation broke down completely and the lines started moving in opposite directions. Degrowthers present historical curves as if these are laws of nature, but we know that they are not. The trend is your friend only til the bend at the end. And the fact that rich countries have hit an inflection point where economic growth no longer depends on growing resource use is a strong indicator that industrializing countries like China will also hit this point as well. (And no, falling use in rich countries is mostly not due to outsourcing, as the emissions graph above illustrates.) So this degrowther argument is just wrong. But degrowthers have a second, far better counter to McAfee’s notion that we can have our cake and eat it too: Decoupling isn’t happening fast enough. If we wait for China and India and all the countries of Africa to industrialize in a resource-intensive way like today’s developed countries did, and then to dematerialize their growth like today’s developed countries are doing now, it will be far too late and the planet will suffer ecological catastrophe. This argument isn’t as strong as it sounds — China and India and the rest will be able to take advantage of the efficiency-inducing technologies created by the developed countries, like solar power (indeed, they are already doing so). And they will be able to embrace “dematerialized” goods and services like social networks and video games (sorry, Xi Jinping) very early in their growth path. So these countries’ resource use trajectories won’t look quite like the U.S.’ or Europe’s. But this degrowther argument does contain a nugget of truth: Global resource use is currently on an unsustainable trajectory. Here, via Zeke Hausfather, are the current projections for global warming by century’s end, even with the advances in technologies like solar: Any one of these scenarios represents utter global catastrophe. So even if there is a sustainable growth path, we are not currently on it. About this, degrowthers are right; a gentle, natural transition to green growth is possible, but is an unaffordable luxury. But degrowthers’ prescription is the wrong one. The reason, in a word, is politics. The kind of massive intention reordering of global production and consumption that degrowthers fantasize about is not just pragmatically impossible to implement, it’s the kind of thing that essentially everyone in the world except for a few very shouty people in Northern Europe and the occasional Twitter activist is going to reject. To see why, let us turn to the excellent articles/podcasts by Milanovic, Piper, and Klein.

Grocery shoppers who care that their food is grown in a responsible and environmentally friendly fashion enjoy plenty of opportunities to buy organic fruits and vegetables — and increasingly they are taking advantage of those opportunities.

The proof: Organic food sales in the United States reached $50.1 billion in 2019, up 4.6% from the previous year, according to the 2020 Organic Industry Survey conducted by the Organic Trade Association.

From the perspective of demand, the economy’s development has placed enormous pressures on the scarce natural resources of Inner Mongolia, and this extensive economic development has led to greater demands for energy and resources, which is characterized by high energy consumption, large amounts of waste, and serious levels of pollution. From 2000 to 2010, about 2469.73 km2 area of other land was converted to urban land, the GDP-2 rate had improved by 29.66% and the GDP-1 rate had fallen by 64.87%; together, this indicates that the economic structure has been transformed, shifting in emphasis from agriculture to industry. The production of energy and the mining of mineral resources have been accompanied by the destruction of vegetation and the accumulation of waste materials [60]. Large areas of grassland, approximately 1754.03 km2 had been converted to urban land via transportation and excavation that have markedly disturbed local natural ecosystems. The soil erosion generated in just one year due to this activity would be the equivalent of the amount of natural, and even agricultural, erosion occurring over dozens of years [61]. The results of this study suggested that increasing the GDP-2 proportion of total GDP could worsen soil erosion. A study of the WuLanMuLun River, in the Shenfu mining area, indicated that sediment discharge had doubled after mining commenced, the erosion modulus of the mining area had increased by 15,000 t/km2 ·a, with a 14.965-million ton increase in the annual soil erosion loss [62]. In addition, heavy industry, mining, and construction not only directly influence the land surface through excavation and waste accumulation, but they indirectly further aggravate soil erosion through road transport and the consumption of resources and energy [63].

When it comes to science reporting, there are some headlines that are so frequently repeated, so intuitively plausible, so closely aligned to our cultural beliefs, that they can seem like incontrovertible truths.

The general public, and indeed many scientists, may fervently believe that these claims reflect the overwhelming scientific consensus. However, sometimes when you dig a little beyond the surface, the evidence underpinning even the most ubiquitous headlines can seem surprisingly shaky.

A reader could be excused for concluding from Matthew R. Sanderson and Stan Cox’s criticism of our recent essay, “Big Agriculture Is Best,” that virtually all environmental impacts associated with the production of food in the United States and globally can be laid at the feet of “industrial agriculture.” But it is a definitional sleight of hand, not “empirical evidence,” as they claim, that does most of the work here. Sanderson and Cox define “industrial agriculture” so capaciously as to be basically synonymous with “agriculture.”

In the United States, that is arguably true. Most agricultural output—and hence environmental impacts—comes from large-scale, industrial production. Globally, it is not true. In both cases, there is no free lunch. Agriculture, unavoidably, has environmental impacts for the simple reason that growing food requires the conversion of forests, grasslands, and other ecosystems into fields whose biocapacity is then monopolized to produce food for people.

Much confusion has arisen from controversies concerning the possible irreversibility of land degradation processes. One source of confusion relates to the - often implicit - assumption that some state of the ecosystem is the 'natural' (Sprugel, 1991) stable state, and that a disturbance, be it a drought or human intervention, would move the system away from this state. If the disturbance were large enough, and the system sufficiently vulnerable, the system would not be able to return to the equilibrium state, and the change would be termed irreversible. The validity of this idea of ecosystem behaviour has been questioned, and semi-arid areas may alternatively be descnbed as eventdriven' systems, constantly undergoing change (Ellis & Swift, 1988 ; Scoones, 1993 ; Behnke & Scoones, 1993). However true it may be that variability is an important feature of dryland ecosystems, it should be remembered that pollen analysis of sediment cores from lakes in the Sahel-Sudan shows a relatively constant floral composition over the last three thousand years (Andres et al., 1996). This indicates that whereas productivity and relative abundance of species may be characterized by variability, ecosystem structure and species composition may be relatively stable. However, much more research is required to resolve this question.

Geologic time is shorthand for slow-paced. But new measurements from steep mountaintops in New Zealand show that rock can transform into soil more than twice as fast as previously believed possible.

The findings were published Jan. 16 in the early online edition of Science.

As biodiversity conservation becomes ever more important on a global scale, restoration is being used increasingly as a tool to temper ecological impacts of development and land-use change (Hobbs et al. 2011; McCarthy et al. 2012), and simply conserving remaining natural areas is no longer sufficient to meet conservation goals (Grimm et al. 2008; McCarthy et al. 2012). While complete restoration of degraded ecosystems rarely is a realistic goal (Hobbs 2007), evidence exists that some taxa, ecological functions and ecosystem services may be returned (Benayas et al. 2009). Therefore, increasing the knowledge and capacity to restore larger proportions of taxa in degraded sites is urgently needed, particularly in biodiversity hotspot regions (Myers et al. 2000).

Ecological restoration is a relatively young science with a rapidly expanding literature investigating restoration capacity (e.g. Ruthrof et al. 2013) as well as debating its efficacy and context for biodiversity conservation (Shackelford et al. 2013). While restoration objectives vary widely, one of the most common is to return native vegetation to degraded sites. Methods for returning vegetation most often involve two distinct approaches; the planting of nursery-raised seedlings, and/or the direct seeding of native species seed mixes. Both of these methods require significant inputs of labour and technical knowledge (i.e. seed collection and storage, germination, propagation, greenhouse use, planting techniques, etc.). A third method, topsoil transfer, the moving of topsoil containing ungerminated but viable soil-stored seeds and other propagules – potentially in high numbers – from newly cleared natural areas to degraded restoration sites, offers the potential to return more species to sites with shorter lag times and lower labour and technical inputs (Koch 2007b). Topsoil transfer has been utilized as a restoration technique in many regions globally, including Spain (Tormo et al. 2007), Japan (Hosogi & Kameyama 2004), Norway (Skrindo & Pedersen 2004), Brazil (Parrotta & Knowles 2001), France (Vécrin & Muller 2003), South Africa (van Rooyen et al. 2004) and Australia (Koch 2007a).

Brett Meyer, January 6 2022, “A Playbook Against Populism? Populist Leadership in Decline in 2021,” Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, https://institute.global/policy/playbook-against-populism-populist-leadership-decline-2021

In our annual update to our Populists in Power database, we find that the number of populist leaders in power at the beginning of 2022 is down from 17 at the beginning of 2021 to 13 – the lowest since 2004. Three of the four populist leaders who lost power were less ideological anti-establishment populists, meaning that the remaining populists are almost all culturally right wing.

Such comparisons between the United States today and Germany in the 1930s are becoming commonplace. As a professional historian, I would like to offer what seems to me a better analogy. Our Tranquil Times Journalists are fond of saying that we are living in a time of “unprecedented” instability. In reality, as numerous studies have shown, our time is a period of remarkable stability in terms of conflict. In fact, viewed globally, there has been a small uptick in organized lethal violence since the misnamed Arab Spring. But even allowing for the horrors of the Syrian civil war, the world is an order of magnitude less dangerous than it was in the 1970s and 1980s, and a haven of peace and tranquility compared with the period between 1914 and 1945. This point matters because the defining feature of interwar fascism was its militarism. Fascists wore uniforms. They marched in enormous and well-drilled parades and they planned wars. That is not what we see today. So why do so many commentators feel that we are living through “unprecedented instability?” The answer, aside from plain ignorance of history, is that political populism has become a global phenomenon, and established politicians and political parties are struggling even to understand it, much less resist it. Yet populism is not such a mysterious thing, if one only has some historical knowledge. The important point is not to make the mistake of confusing it with fascism, which it resembles in only a few respects. Rather like a television chef, I shall describe a recipe for populism, based on historical experience. It is a simple recipe, with just five ingredients. Five Ingredients for A Populist Backlash The first of these ingredients is a rise in immigration. In the past 45 years, the percentage of the population of the United States that is foreign-born has risen from below 5 percent in 1970 to over 13 percent in 2014—almost as high as the rates achieved between 1860 and 1910, which ranged between 13 percent and an all-time high of 14.7 percent in 1890. So when people say, as they often do, that “the United States is a land based on immigration,” they are indulging in selective recollection. There was a period, between 1910 and 1970, when immigration drastically declined. It is only in relatively recent times that we have seen immigration reach levels comparable with those of a century ago, in what has justly been called the first age of globalization. Ingredient number two is an increase in inequality. Drawing on the work done on income distribution by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, we can see that we have recently regained the heights of inequality that were last seen in the pre-World War I period. The share of income going to the top one percent of earners is back up from below 8 percent of total income in 1970 to above 20 percent of total income. The peak before the financial crisis, in 2007, was almost exactly the same as the peak on the eve of the Great Depression in 1928. Ingredient number three is the perception of corruption. For populism to thrive, people have to start believing that the political establishment is no longer clean. Recent Gallup data on public approval of institutions in the United States show, among other things, notable drops in the standing of all institutions save the military and small businesses. Just 9 percent of Americans have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the U.S. Congress—a remarkable figure. It is striking to see which other institutions are down near the bottom of the league. Big business is second-lowest, with just 21 percent of the public expressing confidence in it. Newspapers, television news, and the criminal justice system fare only slightly better. What is even more remarkable is the list of institutions that have fallen furthest in recent times: the U.S. Supreme Court now has just a 36 percent approval rating, down from a historical average of 44 percent, while the Presidency has dropped from 43 percent to 36 percent approval. The financial crisis appears to have convinced many Americans—and not without good reason—that there is an unhealthy and likely corrupt relationship between political institutions, big business, and the media. The fourth ingredient necessary for a populist backlash is a major financial crisis. The three biggest financial crises in modern history—if one uses the U.S. equity market index as the measure—were the crises of 1873, 1929, and 2008. Each was followed by a prolonged period of depressed economic performance, though these varied in their depth and duration. In the most recent of these crises, the peak of the U.S. stock market was October 2007. With the onset of the financial crisis, we essentially replayed for about a year the events of 1929 and 1930. However, beginning in mid to late 2009, we bounced out of the crisis, thanks to a combination of monetary, fiscal, and Chinese stimulus, whereas the Great Depression was characterized by a deep and prolonged decline in stock prices, as well as much higher unemployment rates and lower growth. The first of these historical crises is the least known: the post-1873 “great depression,” as contemporaries called it. What happened after 1873 was nothing as dramatic as 1929; it was more of a slow burn. The United States and, indeed, the world economy went from a financial crisis—which was driven by excessively loose monetary policy and real estate speculation, amongst other things—into a protracted period of deflation. Economic activity was much less impaired than in the 1930s. Yet the sustained decline in prices inflicted considerable pain, especially on indebted farmers, who complained (in reference to the then prevailing gold standard) that they were being “crucified on a cross of gold.” We have come a long way since those days; gold is no longer a key component of the monetary base, and farmers are no longer a major part of the workforce. Nevertheless, in my view, the period after 1873 is much more like our own time, both economically and politically, than the period after 1929. There is still one missing ingredient to be added. If one were cooking, this would be the moment when flames would leap from the pan. The flammable ingredient is, of course, the demagogue, for populist demagogues react vituperatively and explosively against all of the aforementioned four ingredients. Kearney’s Cause Now, my argument is not intended to dismiss or downplay those elements of Donald Trump’s campaign for President of the United States that have been implicitly, if not explicitly, racist. Nor do I treat lightly the various signals he has given of indifference to, or at least ignorance of, the U.S. Constitution. My point is that these demerits do not by themselves qualify Trump for comparison with Mussolini, much less with Hitler. Rather, I want to argue that Trump has much more in common with the demagogues of the earlier, lesser depression of the late nineteenth century, and that it is to that period that we should look for historical analogies and insights. The best illustration of my case is the now forgotten figure of Denis Kearney, leader of the Workingmen’s Party of California and the author of the slogan “The Chinese Must Go!” Himself an Irish immigrant to the United States—as opposed to the son of a Scottish immigrant and grandson of a German, which is what Donald Trump is—Kearney was part of a movement of nativist parties and “Anti-Coolie” clubs that sought to end Chinese immigration into the United States. The report of the Joint Special Committee to Investigate Chinese Immigration in 1877 gives a flavor of the times. “The Pacific coast must in time become either Mongolian or American,” was the committee’s view. The report argued that the Chinese brought with them the habits of despotic government, a tendency to lie in court, a weakness for tax evasion and “insufficient brainspace […] to furnish [the] motive power for self-government.” Moreover, Chinese women were “bought and sold for prostitution and treated worse than dogs,” while the Chinese were “cruel and indifferent to their sick.” Giving such inferior beings citizenship, the committee’s report declared, “would practically destroy republican institutions on the Pacific coast.” The realities were, it scarcely needs to be said, very different. According to the “Six Companies” of Chinese in San Francisco—corporate bodies that represented the Chinese population of the city—there was compelling evidence that Chinese immigration was a boon to California. Not only did the Chinese provide labor for the state’s rapidly developing railroads and farms; they also tended to improve the neighborhoods in which they settled. Moreover, there was no evidence of a disproportionate Chinese role in gambling and prostitution. In fact, statistics showed that the Irish were more of a charge on the city’s hospital and almshouse than the Chinese. Nevertheless, a powerful coalition of “laboring men and artisans,” small businessmen and “grangers” (the term used to describe those who aimed to shift the burden of taxation onto big business and the rich) rallied to Kearney’s cause. As one shrewd contemporary observer noted, part of his appeal was that he was attacking not just the Chinese, but also the big steamship and railroad companies that profited from employing Chinese labor, not to mention the corrupt two-party establishment that ran San Francisco politics: Neither Democrats nor Republicans had done, nor seemed likely to do, anything to remove these evils or to improve the lot of the people. They were only seeking (so men thought) places or the chance of jobs for themselves, and could always be bought by a powerful corporation. Working men must help themselves; there must be new methods and a new departure […] The old parties, though both denouncing Chinese immigration in every convention they held, and professing to legislate against it, had failed to check it […] Everything, in short, was ripe for a demagogue. Fate was kind to the Californians in sending them a demagogue of a mean type, noisy and confident, but with neither political foresight nor constructive talent. Kearney may have lacked foresight and “constructive talent,” but there is no gainsaying what he and his ilk were able to achieve. Beginning with the Page Law (1875) prohibiting the immigration of Asian women for “lewd or immoral purposes,” American legislators scarcely rested until Chinese immigration to the United States had been stopped altogether. The Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) suspended immigration of Chinese for 10 years, introduced “certificates of registration” for departing laborers (effectively re-entry permits), required Chinese officials to vet travelers from Asia, and, for the first time in American history, created an offense of illegal immigration, with the possibility of deportation as a part of the penalty. The Foran Act (1885) banned all contract laborers from immigrating to America. Legislation passed in the Scott Act (1888) banned all Chinese from travel to the United States except “teachers, students, merchants, or travelers for pleasure.” In all, between 1875 and 1924, more than a dozen pieces of legislation served to restrict and finally end altogether Chinese immigration. No one should therefore underestimate the power of populism. For all his coarseness and bombast, Denis Kearney and his allies effectively sealed the American border along the Pacific coast of the United States; indeed, one cartoon of the time depicted them constructing a wall across the San Francisco harbor. In the 1850s and 1860s, as many as 40 percent of all Chinese emigrants had travelled beyond Asia, though the numbers arriving in the United States had in fact been relatively small (between 1870 and 1880, a total of 138,941 Chinese immigrants came, just 4.3 percent of the total, a share dwarfed by the vast European exodus across the Atlantic in the same period). What exclusion did ensure in the late nineteenth was that Chinese immigration would not grow, as it surely would have, but instead dwindled and then ceased. Ironies Populism, then, is not just a form of political entertainment. One sometimes hears it said of Donald Trump: “Ah, he says wild things on the campaign trail, but when he is president it will be fine.” History suggests otherwise. It suggests that men who threaten to restrict immigration—as well as to impose tariffs and to discourage capital export, as populists generally do—mean what they say. Indeed, populists are under a special compulsion to enact what they pledge in the campaign trail, for their followers are fickle to begin with. In the case of Trump, most have already defected from the Republican Party establishment. If he fails to deliver, they can defect from him, too. Of course, populists are bound eventually to disappoint their supporters. For populism is a toxic brew as well as an intoxicating one. Populists nearly always make life miserable for whichever minorities they chose to scapegoat, but they seldom make life much better for the people whose ire they whip up. Whatever the demagogues may promise—and they always promise “jam today”—populism tends to have significantly more economic costs than benefits. Restricting immigration, imposing tariffs on imported goods, penalizing firms for investing abroad: such measures, if adopted by an American government in 2017, would be almost certain to reduce growth and employment, rather than the reverse. That has certainly been the Latin American experience—and few regions of the world have run the populist experiment more often. The foreign dimension brings us to a final irony. Despite their habitual insistence on narrow national self-interest, populists are nearly always part of a global phenomenon. Globalization had been making enormous strides prior to 1873, with world trade, migration, and international capital flows growing at unprecedented rates. But the crisis of that year generated a populist backlash against globalization that was itself global in its scope. Then, just as now, the principal targets of the demagogues were immigration, free trade, and high finance. Just as the United States excluded immigrants and raised tariffs, so did European countries by adopting similar discriminatory measures. In Bismarck’s Germany, populism was often antisemitic—as it was in the France of the Dreyfus Affair—while in late Victorian Britain it was anti-Irish. Tariffs went up almost everywhere except in Britain. Populism today has a similarly global quality. In June, the British vote to leave the European Union was hailed by populists right across the European continent as well as by Donald Trump in the United States and, implicitly, by Vladimir Putin in Russia. Yielding to the Complicators Let me conclude with a note of qualified optimism. Because populism is not fascism, populist victories should not be construed as harbingers of war—if anything, the opposite is true. In the 1870s and 1880s, populists did achieve significant reductions in globalization: not only immigration restrictions, but also higher tariffs. But they did not form many national governments, and they did not subvert any constitutions. Nor were populists much interested in starting wars; if anything, they lent towards isolationism and viewed imperialism as just another big business racket. In most countries, the populist high tide was in the 1880s. What came next—in many ways as a reaction to populism, but also as an alternative set of policy solutions to the same public grievances—was Progressivism in the United States and socialism in Europe. Perhaps something similar will also happen in our time. Perhaps that is something to look forward to. Nevertheless, we would do well to remember that World War I broke out during the progressive not the populist era. The world today is, as I observed at the outset, in much less turmoil than one might infer from television news. Nevertheless, the economic and social consequences of globalization and the most recent financial crisis sowed the seeds for the populist backlash that we now see. Populists are not fascists. They prefer trade wars to actual wars; administrative border walls to more defensible fortifications. The maladies they seek to cure are not imaginary: uncontrolled rising immigration, widening inequality, free trade with “unfree” countries, and political cronyism are all things that a substantial section of the electorate have some reason to dislike. The problem with populism is that its remedies are wrong and, in fact, counterproductive. What we most have to fear—as was true of Brexit—is not therefore Armageddon, but something more prosaic: an attempt to reverse certain aspects of globalization, followed by disappointment when the snake oil does not really cure the patient’s ills, followed by the emergence of a new and ostensibly more progressive set of remedies for our current malaise. The “terrible simplifiers” may have their day then. But they will end up yielding power to well-intentioned complicators, those more congenial to educated elites, but probably every a bit as dangerous, if not more so.

TORONTO – In this new era of geopolitical upheaval, business leaders, politicians, policymakers, and academics are anticipating a more fragmented, multipolar world order, with many predicting especially consequential changes in the international monetary system. America’s pandemic policies and the broader response to Russia’s war on Ukraine have triggered widespread speculation about the future of the US dollar’s hegemony, and while warnings about the eclipse of the greenback are not new, some commentators believe that this time is different.

True, high inflation, rising US public debt, and other key developments are unfolding in a strategic environment that is increasingly reminiscent of the Cold War. The most striking parallel is the return of great-power rivalries and policymakers’ preoccupation with security concerns, which are taking precedence over economic efficiency. But while the elevation of security issues is clearly reshuffling some alliances and economic relationships, it is unlikely that these changes will usher in a multipolar currency system in the foreseeable future.

Generations of American policymakers have been right to protect the dollar’s key currency role for economic reasons. Most notably, dollar hegemony affords the U.S. the ability to run large and prolonged budget and balance-of-payments deficits. The dollar represents 62 percent of allocated foreign exchange reserves, is used to invoice and settle roughly half of world trade, and accounts for 42 percent of global payments. Because governments, banks, and businesses worldwide need lots of dollars, the world market always stands ready to absorb new U.S.-dollar-denominated debt without charging higher interest rates.

Adler and Bessner correctly point out that the rest of the world considers the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency to be an “exorbitant privilege,” a term coined in the 1960s by then French Finance Minister Valéry Giscard D’Estaing. The ability to spend beyond its means has enabled the U.S. to fund its impressive military might, whether one views that power as the fountainhead of Pax Americana or the source of illegitimate military adventurism.