In the beginning was, no, not the Word but the Wild West, because we are dealing here not with the Gospel according to St. John, but with a pseudo scripture according to a bunch of contemporary con-missionaries whose claims, over many decades, to having saved humanity from the clutches of the demon that is poverty have never been backed with hard evidence on the ground. Their small flock of followers don’t need any such proof; they have what it takes to move mountains.

Nevertheless, Saint George W. Bush and his corporate apostles, notably the World Bank, the IMF and WTO, would have us now believe that the utopia they have firmly established in their own fertile imagination will have no end, and will flourish forever and a day.

Indeed, these saints-come-lately exude a sort of biblical certainty when holding out the assurance of everlasting happiness to the wretched of the earth that have lived in hope while wallowing in squalid urban slums all their lives. What’s necessary for salvation, they sermonize, is for the political leaders of this permanently poor segment of society in the Third World to accept, in a supreme act of blind faith, Corporate America’s own revised version of the Word.

And that word is Globalization.

While attempting for several decades now to fast-track economic globalization, America has also poured billions upon billions of dollars into Space exploration, with President Bush announcing in an election-year that the US would send astronauts back to the Moon to prepare for exploration further afield, and establish a lunar base for human exploration of Mars.

That somehow seems very much in character. In his first four years, GWB’s foreign policy initiatives managed to make such a mess of the only planet that we have to call ‘home’, set a good part of it ablaze with the enthusiasm of a pyromaniac, and even put the survival of the Earth itself and all its inhabitants seriously in question by his contempt for prudent environmental house-keeping. Small wonder, then, that he should also look for an exit strategy from Earth - under the guise of ‘exploration further afield’ - as eagerly as he is trying to hightail it out of Iraq right now.

It’s the same Bush who not too long ago (and in another context) mouthed the taunt "You can run, but you cannot hide’. Actually, there comes a point in time when one can do neither. Suggest you get on the treadmill, chum, and pretend you’re invisible.

Golden age

How come the golden age that has been promised for decades is yet to materialize? What has gone wrong, and why? The problem is fundamental in nature : it’s because America’s corporate vision today is no different to that of the cowboys of its frontier societies of the old Wild West.

And that ‘cowboy’ parallel was first drawn a long time ago, as far back as 1968 to be precise, by Kenneth E. Boulding in a classic essay titled The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth in a Johns Hopkins University Press publication edited by Henry Jarrett.

The point Boulding made so long ago was that humanity’s problem was the direct result of some of the species acting like cowboys on a limitless open frontier.

Boulding’s thesis was that primitive men, and to a large extent also men of the early civilizations, imagined themselves to be living on a virtually illimitable plane. "There was almost always somewhere beyond the known limits of human habitation, and over a very large part of the time that man has been on earth, there has been something of a frontier`85always was some place else to go when things got too difficult, either by reason of the deterioration of the natural environment or a deterioration of the social structure in places where people happened to live."

The image of the frontier, Boulding believes, is probably one of the oldest images of mankind and hence hard to get rid of. It was only very gradually that man, beginning with the ancient Greeks, became accustomed to the notion of a spherical earth and to a closed sphere of human activity.

The circumnavigations and the geographical explorations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, ensured the general acceptance of Earth being a sphere. "Even in the thirteenth century," notes Boulding, "the commonest map was Mercator’s projection, which visualizes the earth as an illimitable cylinder, essentially a plane wrapped around the globe`85Even now we are very far from having made the moral, political and psychological adjustments implied in this transition from the illimitable plane to the closed sphere."

Says Boulding with much unconscious understatement: "The closed earth of the future requires economic principles which are somewhat different from those of the open earth of the past," and then almost apologetically makes us privy to his thinking. "For the sake of picturesqueness, I am tempted to call the open economy the ‘cowboy economy’, the cowboy being symbolic of the illimitable plains and also associated with reckless, exploitative, romantic, and violent behaviour which is characteristic of open societies."

He is however critical of the economists of his day for they, in his view, "failed to come to grips with the ultimate consequences of the transition from the [concept of] open to the closed earth`85they continue to think and act as if production, consumption, throughput, and the GNP were the sufficient and adequate measure of economic success."

Given that scenario, the open earth ‘cowboy economy’ unthinkingly welcomes continually increasing levels of consumption and production only because it has never occurred to anybody to link the two to the need both for infinite reservoirs of needed raw materials and for equally infinite waste-disposal reservoirs to adequately handle the ensuing pollution by way of effluvia and excrement.

The corollary is a ‘closed earth’ economy without unlimited reservoirs of anything, either for extraction or for pollution, and in which, Boulding rightly concludes, "man must find his place in a cyclical ecological system which is capable of continuous reproduction of material`85"

It stands to reason that only where there are infinite reservoirs to obtain raw material and deposit effluvia, can the ‘throughput of GNP’ be considered a plausible measure of the success of an economy.

Rosy predictions

Boulding also drew attention to a crucial lacuna which seriously flaws GNP as a measure of a country’s actual economic well-being, one that economists and Central Banks have together chosen to ignore to this day. The truth, they say, will make you free; it also tends to screw up rosy predictions. Sunshine stories are the staple diet of the dream-makers.

GNP, in his view, is only a rough measure of total throughput. ‘It should be possible, however, to distinguish that part of the GNP derived from exhaustible and that which is derived from reproducible sources, as well as that part of consumption which represents effluvia and that which represents input into the productive system again. Nobody, as far as I know, has ever attempted to break down GNP in this way, although`85it would be an extremely important exercise`85"..

Of course, Boulding’s uniquely insightful observation of 1968 was promptly forgotten, gone with the wind. Now that we are in 2005, it is all too clear the transnational corporations that rule the world have not the slightest intention of making the necessary "moral, political and psychological adjustments implied" in the transition from an infinite to a truly finite abode. For the world’s modern cowboys, there’s yet some place else on the Open Frontier just beyond the horizon that’s blessed with seemingly inexhaustible material resources, all for free, to be used and discarded at will for the earth to absorb as best it can.

Boulding did consider what prompted such profligacy and opined : "It may be said, of course, why worry about all this`85let us eat, drink, spend, extract and pollute, and be as merry as we can, and let posterity worry`85 It is always a little hard to find a convincing answer to the man who says, "What has posterity ever done for me?‘"

There is one school of thought which urges that the problem of scarcities, whether of raw materials or of pollutable reservoirs, can safely be left to the future, and there is no use giving ourselves ulcers by worrying about problems that we do not really have to solve. Says Boulding : "There is even high ethical authority for this point of view in the New Testament, which advocates that we should take no thought for tomorrow and let the dead bury their dead."

The problem for us is that some forget, while some others choose not to remember, that we too are astronauts in space, and that our home, Earth, is itself a totally self-contained Spaceship naturally equipped with self-regulating life-support systems indescribably more complex than anything that have so far been envisioned by the human mind and produced by human hand. And that Spaceship Earth, the planet we live in, is very much an integral part of the solar system.

Is the ‘astronaut’ aspect of our existence so easily overlooked simply because ‘spaceship’ Earth’s environment permits us humans to live, and stay alive, in our natural state sans the comically bloated Mr. Michelin-like suits our own kind are photographed cavorting in when no longer in the comforting embrace of Earth’s hospitable atmosphere?

That premise finds little or no support in the evidence. If anything, America’s National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA) exemplifies the vast gap in that country’s conscious approach to life on Earth and to life in Space. On Earth, everything’s taken for granted.

The clearest evidence of our criminal culpability for the continuing reckless disregard of reality is highlighted [with emphasis added] in the following NASA quote : "Rationing and recycling will be an essential part of daily life on the Space Station... In orbit, where Earth’s natural life-support system is missing, the Space Station itself has to provide abundant power, clean water, and breathable air at the right temperature and humidity - 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, indefinitely. Nothing can go to waste."

The Agency overlooks the elementary (that we are ‘in space’) and reminds earthlings that, "once in space, they’ve got to do without the luxury of dashing to the restroom for a quick splash at the lavatory, or better yet, a luxurious hot shower." In other words, have yourself a ball down here on terra firma, because it’s ‘dry clean’ all the way after ablutions up there! Also, the boys and girls have to make do on a steady diet of sponge baths using water distilled from - among other places - their crewmates’ breath. Ugh!

"If you’re squeamish, read no farther," the website advises. "Sometimes it’s better not to think about where your next glass of water is coming from!"

One is entitled in the circumstances to resort to the vulgar to drive the point home: just piss off and recycle.

NASA tells the whole world via its website about the major practical challenges of living in ‘space’, and stresses how vital it is for ‘astronauts’ to use and re-use their precious supplies of water and air, conveniently ignoring the fact that we are astronauts, already living in space, and need to prudently use and re-use what nature provides us for free right here on Spaceship Earth as well.

NASA, it should be remembered, is truly the child of the corporate marriage of minds, better known as the military-industrial complex. Its special agenda and objective: to ensure America beats the competition in the conquest and colonization of other ‘worlds’ in the solar system.

What is conveniently forgotten is how different the lifestyle of the astronaut is from that of the cowboy. When venturing into the unknown, the cowboy-turned-astronaut must ensure that everything is maintained in balance, recycled; nothing can be wasted. The measure of well-being up there, says David Korten, "is not how fast the crew is able to consume its limited stores but rather how effective the crew members are in maintaining their physical and mental health, their shared resource stocks, and the life-support systems on which they all depend. What is thrown away is forever inaccessible. What is accumulated without recycling fouls the living space. Crew members function as a team in the interests of the whole."

Korten believes that humanity on Earth has passed over the historic threshold from an open frontier, and that our life-support systems are already over-burdened to breaking point. On our current course, we are at once plundering our planet and tearing apart the fabric of non-market social relationships that are the foundation of human civilization, a direct consequence of the misperception of the human relationship to natural systems.

Boulding’s analogy conveys a basic truth, concludes Korten. "Modern societies are practicing cowboy economics in what has become a spaceship world`85We now have the option of accepting this new reality or destroying our ecological niche and suffering tragic consequences."

And GWB has got himself four more years`85