Epiphanies are deep awakenings or profound insights that usually arise from a crisis, typically when an old understanding or belief system is shattered by a wholly incongruous experience or event. As the old adage reminds us, such awakenings are usually preceded by rude awakenings.

Many people have been rudely awakened these days as the seismic effects of a global financial crisis ripple around the planet: halted construction projects, frozen economic activity, rising unemployment, crashing businesses and collapsing stock markets — world stock losses are now estimated at more than $30 trillion. Anyone paying attention is in a state of shock and bewilderment, ripe for that special kind of awakening that leads to paradigm shifts in understanding.

Basically, the new realization is that our free-market economic system — the one espoused, popularized, liberalized and then internationalized during the last century — is an ideology. Not all commentators will say so using this single word. In the bastion of the free-market system, the United States, analysts use euphemisms such as "unprecedented", "meltdown", "disastrous", "extraordinary" and "uncharted waters" to describe the economic crisis, as if something were wrong with outside events rather than with the system itself.

But some thoughtful skeptics— economists, sociologists, philosophers and ecologists — are now identifying and validating flaws that have previously gone unnoticed by true believers. Perhaps a few of these believers will lose their unquestioning faith in the "self-regulating" power of an unsupervised economic system and the "invisible hand" that is supposed to guide the market with unerring wisdom.

Will Hutton, writing in the Guardian Weekly (Oct. 17-23/08) insightfully concludes that the "financial pandemic" is occurring because "the markets no longer have any faith [in] the world financial system they helped create".

Other critics have been voicing and demonstrating their doubts for years. Anyone who has protested about the treatment of poor countries under liberalized global trade agreements knew something was amiss. (The same government assistance now being proffered to shore up troubled wealthy economies are using precisely the same strategies that were previously denied to poor economies because such methods were deemed by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to contradict sound monetary management.) Anyone who watched ecologies being destroyed to support corporate interests had doubts about free-market economics. If this system is so profoundly ingenious and so infallibly successful at producing wealth, why does it leave a third of humanity living in abject poverty? Why does the gap between rich and poor widen in lockstep with the easing of market restrictions? Why is such an economic system directly linked to the wrecking of the planet's ecosystems?

Madeleine Bunting, also writing in the Guardian Weekly (Oct. 10-16//08), contends that, "We are now witnessing the collapse of this absurd economic orthodoxy that has dominated politics for nearly 30 years. Its triumphalist arrogance... has been comparable to Soviet communism in its scale." The economic results have been "unstable and inequitable, [with] unacceptable levels of social disruption and hardship". Her other words cut more deeply. "Add that to the two other central charges against deregulated capitalism: first, it may create wealth, but it does not distribute it effectively; and second, that it takes no account of what it cannot commodify — neither the social relationships of family and community nor the environment, which are vital to human wellbeing and indeed to the functioning of the market itself."

Environmentalists have made token concessions to this juggernaut of economic argument by trying to use the market's own language to advocate for the protection of ecologies under threat from commercial activity. In 2003, a group of US scientists calculated that the planet's 17 natural ecosystems provide more than $33 trillion annually in free services to human interests. This year, Pavan Sukhdev, a Deutsche Bank economist, calculated that we are "losing natural capital worth between $2 trillion and $5 trillion every year as a result of deforestation alone" (Ibid. Oct. 24-30/08).

Indeed, more and more environmental damage can be linked to the direct and indirect consequences of a global economic system gone amok with deregulation. In BC, we can count at least $1 billion in losses from the devastation of our interior forests caused by the joint effects of rising greenhouse gases and the mountain pine beetle. The unmeasured costs of losing our wild salmon can be linked to climate change, habitat destruction, open-net fish farming and over-fishing. And how many communities like the Comox Valley have lost many millions of economic benefit when a valuable river ecosystem like the Tsolum is destroyed because of ill-conceived and incompetently supervised mining operations? And now the Campbell River area may be on a slow-motion slide into the same travesty as coal mining wastes leach into the Quinsam River watershed. Unregulated profit-making has a way of becoming very expensive, indeed.

Maybe our destructive enchantment with an unrestrained, free-market economic system will be broken by the current financial turmoil that is shaking the globe. And maybe — just maybe — we will be able to use this crisis as an incentive to rebuild the system in some semblance of intelligent balance so it can satisfy our material needs while preserving the world's natural beauty and protecting the ecologies we must have if our human endeavours are to continue on this beleaguered planet of ours. The symbolic beginning of a new year is an ideal time to start civilizing and modernizing this dysfunctional economic ideology.