Princen: Long term, ISA2007
2/27/2007
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capacities, I have shown above, are perfectly compatible with biological, psychological,
anthropological, and historical evidence for human long-term thinking.
As a metaphor for contemporary human decisionmaking—agricultural and otherwise—
under conditions of global ecological constraint, saving the seed plays out in several ways:
1) Rather than having an objective of maximizing a monetary return for a given
investment, saving the seed is about ensuring a crop. It is about food security, not about an
abstraction (money) and the status displays it enables via accumulation and consumption.
2) It generates questions of sufficiency—how much land is enough, how much too little,
to grow the seed and ensure the crop? Such questions are alien in the banking metaphor.
3) The future is appreciated, not depreciated as with positive discount rates.
4) The common sense of saving the seed is intelligible to everyone. One does not need
special training, esoteric knowledge, or sophisticated concepts to get it.
5) Saving the seed is inherently ecological. Plants have evolved the capacity to produce
seeds; animals have devised means of collecting them—e.g., squirrels burying nuts, picas storing
hay, bees making honey, humans putting up caches.
6) Normatively, saving the seed is about prudent behavior, about not taking unnecessary
risks for self and others, about foregoing the bonanza for the steady income, about building
foundations not rearranging the furniture, about integrating work and play and the building of
community.
The practical challenge, of course, is to substitute the seed metaphor for the prevailing
banking metaphor and do so in real-life situations. And it is to find other metaphors that meet
criteria such as:
i. promotes human security
ii. is sensitive to excess
iii. has a long time horizon
iv. is intuitive
v. dovetails with ecological processes
vi. is prudent.
It’s a tall order, but an order worth pursuing as the temporal gap (expanding environmental time
scales and contracting decisionmaking time scales) widens and long crises such as global
warming bring irreversible and disastrous change.
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They are not alien to some financial principles, I should add. Spending the interest, not the principle; diversifying one’s portfolio;
living within one’s means; all these have ecological counterparts. See Princen, “Ecological Consonance,” paper in progress.
Convention