What if nature isn't a female, all-giving goddess, but a bank charging us interest?

From 'mother Earth' to 'planetary insolvency'

I’ve been in the linguistics game long enough to know that the words that seem the most banal are often really dangerous. They seem so harmless, that no-one bothers to pick them up and give them a shake and a sniff. I’ve had one of these words on my ‘to-do’ list for a while. It’s not planetary insolvency - that one jumps right out at you like birkinstocks paired with a Gucci suit. It wears its heart on its sleeve. It is demanding attention and we really need to listen.

It is a very new idea, born only last year to actuarial parents. I’ll get to all that, and along the way argue why it it is time to give up on our mother Earth metaphor. But I want to start with a word that is hundreds of years old, and which seems completely inert. As if it is simply telling us like it is. The word is resource. And before we get to its modern meaning, we need to know where it has come from.

The Latin root of resource is surgere, which means ‘to rise’, which it shares with words like resurgence and resurrection. Surgere became resourdre in Old French, with the meaning ‘to rise again, recover’. English adopts the word resource in the 1600s as ‘a means to supply a deficiency or need’ or in plural form, ‘stocks or reserves of money, materials, people, or some other asset, which can be drawn on when necessary’.

The following century, the notion of natural resources is derived to refer to ‘those materials or substances of a place which can be used to sustain life or for economic exploitation’. The OED first attests this term to 1776 - two years before the British arrived in Sydney Harbour - in a work by the economist Adam Smith, whose discussion of how wealth was being generated in various European colonies up to his time would foreshadow the approach to the colonization of Australia.

Source: Oxford Languages: https://languages.oup.com/google-dictionary-en/

The concept of resource sees the world from the point of view of whether something can be beneficial to humans. It is not a resource if humans haven’t identified it as something we need. Things that we depend on, invisibly - like a stable climate - haven’t been understood as natural resource. The word’s hidden meaning is of something that is rising again - as if we can ‘re-source’ resources. But we are learning the hard way that only some of things we call ‘resources’ are very much finite - and we have yet to appreciate the many invisible ‘resources’ on which we very much depend.

Time to leave behind our metaphor of Mother Earth?

The idea of natural resources puts nature at our mercy. Nature is there for our taking and plundering. This way of seeing our word is called extractivism - I wrote about it recently, and in fact it was my very own, very first, Climate Word of the Year. Extractivism sees the Earth as something that can keep on giving, without us worrying about its limits. There’s something else that we treat as always self-sacrificing, and so it is no wonder that we use the metaphor of 'mother’ to understand our relationship with our planet and its ‘natural resources’.

The idea of ‘mother Earth’ or ‘mother nature’ is a very old meme which exists in many of the world’s cultures. The Greeks revered Gaia, the goddess of the Earth who creates herself and all other gods, and on which earth itself was believed to rest. The ideas of ‘Mother Earth’ and ‘Earth Mother’ have linked nature to motherhood, fertility and endless creation. Not only a metaphor for many environmentalists, the Greek goddess Gaia was borrowed by scientists in the late 1960s to see the Earth ‘as a single organism that actively maintains the conditions necessary for its survival’. Scientist James Lovelock coined the ‘Gaia principle’ to explain the unique living quality of our planet, in stark contrast to the planets around ours which are dead. When invited by NASA to be part of the team analysing the moon’s surface, Lovelock understood for the first time that the atmospheric conditions on Earth - both reactive and stable over time - were essentially regulated by life. To grasp this interconnectedness, he too reached for a feminine, maternal metaphor.

Mother is a very old word in English, and exists both as a noun and a verb. As the dictionary tells us, to mother someone does not require a biological relationship. The definition of mother in the Oxford English Dictionary echoes the meaning of resource: it means to ‘be the source or originator of, give rise to, produce’. To this we can add the following meanings:

to bring up, take care of, or protect as a mother; to look after in a (sometimes excessively) kindly and protective way’.

Mothers get ‘mother guilt’ - for which there is no male equivalent. The ‘good mother’ always prioritizes others’ needs and wants. She gives without expecting anything in return.

Maybe its time to stop thinking of, and treating, our planet as if it is our mother - as the one we can simply take-for-granted and from whom we can expect unconditional love? Maybe the ‘mother Earth’ idea has run its course?

What if the Earth is a bank not a mother?

What if we imagine Earth as a bank we have been borrowing from to run the human civilisation business. A bank, or maybe several banks, from which we keep on borrowing. Banks with which we hold several different credit cards, which keep on maxing out, with growing debts, and interest payments we have no hope of paying, much less of reducing the principal sum.

Enter the new metaphor of ‘planetary insolvency’ from some very alarmed actuaries - specifically, from the UK’s Faculty and Institute of Actuaries. Actuaries are the specialists who calculate and cost risk. These people hold up the insurance and superannuation industries. The techniques of risk assessment developed by this profession manage the global pension market which has $55 trillion of assets, and they provide risk analysis to the global insurance market, collecting $8 trillion of premiums annually.

While pollies and billionaires can ignore and demean climate scientists, maybe they will have to listen to the people who bring this kind of very high level, very important, financial expertise to the table. The UK’s Institute and Faculty of Actuaries are so alarmed by our growing debt to Earth, and the rising risks of societal collapse that they have begun a collaboration with climate scientists at Exeter University. This year’s report is the 4th joint report with scientists based at Exeter, and it was in last year’s report that they coined the idea of ‘planetary insolvency’.

The report tells us the scale of our borrowings from the Bank of Earth, and what are rising debts have produced:

Since the Industrial Revolution there has been unprecedented resource extraction, powered by fossil energy, population growth and technological innovation. This has driven significant Earth system disruption, alongside inequality and health crises. Greenhouse gas levels have soared, causing global warming. Deforestation and land use change have eroded biodiversity and disrupted ecosystems. Agricultural practices and industrial processes have overloaded natural cycles with pollutants such as nitrogen, phosphorus and plastics.

The report is scary to read, with the only light relief coming from the end of the world scenarios being described in the language of the British upper class, e.g. ‘catatrophic or extreme impacts’ being ‘eminently plausible’.

When you take more than you give, you create what actuaries call a ‘demand-supply gap for natural resources’. When these gaps are compounded by global warming, shit gets real, as in the chance that by 2030, there will be a 40% shortfall in the global water supply (see p. 33 of their report).

Source: https://actuaries.org.uk/document-library/thought-leadership/thought-leadership-campaigns/climate-papers/planetary-solvency-finding-our-balance-with-nature/

Scientists have developed ‘Earth System Boundaries’ for systems like climate, the biosphere, and water, and for limits on pollution. For the actuaries, these are the planets’ ‘solvency limits’. When we cross them we are headed towards insolvency:

An insolvent planet is one in a state where we have degraded the Earth system to such an extent that we can no longer receive enough of the critical services we rely on to support our society and economy. For example, shortages of food and fresh water, or uninhabitable climatic conditions.

These ‘ecosystem services’ are, in actuarial-speak often ‘non-substitutable’ - as in the immortal lyrics of Joni Mitchell, ‘don’t it always seem to go, you don’t know what you got till it’s gone’. We may be well on our way to planetary bankrupcy. The actuaries’ new concept on planetary insolvency is intended to help with communicating just how bad our current state of living on this planet is, and the very grim trajectory ahead. It is a new metaphor on offer, and well worth exploring.

As ASIC will tell you, trading insolvent can get you into all kinds of trouble. But Earth has no company directors to be held accountable - just a bunch of rogue businessmen (sic), who don’t seem concerned about our growing debt to the Bank of Earth. As we wend our way to planetary insolvency, the planet is starting to show she - no other pronouns seem to work here - is a bit less Gaia and a bit more Kali as she calls in her debts.