The Constant Economy by Zac Goldsmith

Caroline Lucas spots some obvious gaps in a 10-step plan for the environment
Caroline Lucas
The Guardian, Saturday 26 September 2009
The challenge of raising the profile of green issues is hardly a new one. Back in 1974, Teddy Goldsmith fought a general election on behalf of "People", which later became the Green party. Searching for an eye-catching way of highlighting the issue of soil erosion in East Anglia, Teddy led a camel on a lead bearing the slogan: "No deserts in Suffolk. Vote Goldsmith." Perhaps unsurprisingly, he lost his deposit.
The Constant Economy
: How to Build a Stable Society
by Zac Goldsmith
256,
Atlantic Books
Buy The Constant Economy at the Guardian bookshop
Thirty five years later, his nephew, Zac Goldsmith, parliamentary candidate for the Conservative party in Richmond Park, is unlikely to lose his deposit, and he has chosen a more orthodox method of promoting his ideas. His new book, The Constant Economy, sets out 10 steps which the government must take to "restore balance to our relationship with the world around us".
For Goldsmith, a "constant economy" is one in which resources are valued, food is grown sustainably and goods are built to last. It is a system which recognises nature's limits, where energy security is based on renewable resources and strong communities are valued as the most effective protection against social, economic and environmental instability.
Each chapter elaborates on one of the 10 steps, and offers inspiring examples of where solutions are already being practised (frustratingly without footnotes or references). Yet for a book nominally about the economy, Goldsmith has surprisingly little to say about economics. In spite of its title, the book doesn't draw on the ground-breaking work of Herman Daly and his development of "steady state economics", nor does it go as far as the Sustainable Development Commission's equally ground-breaking recent report, Prosperity Without Growth.
Rather, it repeats the well-trodden ground of the limits to GDP and the importance of alternative economic indicators, perhaps reflecting in its reluctance to enter deeper into the economics debate his own ambivalence about the role of the market.
Caricaturing the green movement as having "fractured" into "lighter" greens, who promote green consumerism, and "darker" greens, who promote "alarm, pessimism and disenchantment", he criticises the latter for believing that "we are faced with a choice between the economy and ecology."
Yet that's not what most greens, dark or otherwise, believe. The choice, rather, is between a steady state economy, in balance with our wider environment, or an economy based on endless economic growth, which is likely to destroy our environment, yet which continues to be promoted by all three of the larger parties.
And while it is certainly true that, in the past, the green movement has not spent enough time promoting the benefits of a post-carbon economy, if he really thinks that most greens deliberately identify "the hardest, most punitive solutions, and when they describe the challenge, it is invariably insurmountable", then he's spending too much time with the wrong people.
The 10 steps which Goldsmith describes are certainly good ones, but I'm not sure we can let him off the hook for the issues he chooses not to address – population growth, for one. To his credit, he acknowledges that it "deserves a chapter to itself", but he declines to give it one because "this book is about solutions, and there are not obvious or ethically acceptable solutions to population growth". At a time when millions of women in the south are desperate for the means to control their own fertility, and when governments in the north are perversely giving incentives to women to have larger families, this seems an odd conclusion to draw.
Electoral reform is another issue conspicuous by its absence. Goldsmith boldly announces that we need "radical and urgent reform of our political system ... to galvanise the people and rejuvenate democracy", yet the one reform which would make the most difference is absent. Localism is promoted instead. Yet while popular referenda and recall systems are useful ways of generating greater engagement in the political process, to ignore the need for a fairer voting system seems perverse.
Throughout the book, Goldsmith builds a compelling case that the solutions to the environmental crisis exist, and all it requires is the political will to implement them. I agree – but is David Cameron's Conservative party likely to oblige? Presumably Goldsmith believes it will – or he wouldn't have chosen to be a Conservative candidate.
But while I admire his optimism, it's hard to find much justification for it, when measured against the way most Tory politicians actually behave. Take his MEP colleagues: on just about all of the very sensible proposals Goldsmith makes – proposals which, I can't resist pointing out, are championed by the Greens – Conservative members have consistently voted against. Whether it's promoting a zero-waste strategy and higher emission standards for cars, for example, or a moratorium on all aviation expansion and a rejection of nuclear power, his Tory colleagues are stubbornly opposed to progress.
Despite all of this, The Constant Economy is a compelling read, and inspiring in its positive, solution-oriented focus. Whether Goldsmith will be given the latitude to pursue this agenda if the Conservatives win the next election is another question.