The Limits to Growth –are we there yet?

The “experts” are all telling us, reassuringly, that the global recession is over and it won’t be long before we are back to the good old days of hedge funds, derivatives, Ponzi schemes, corporate bankers’ mega-bonuses, Hummers and, the biggest whopper of all, full employment. If these prognostications are correct we must assume that these “experts” know what caused the economic crash in the first place. No one, and especially former US federal reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan, has shown anything but complete surprise that the whole house of cards actually collapsed so precipitously – it didn’t fit the model he had in his head, he explained.

The unasked question is:  What if we have reached yet another of those elephants in the garden that we have become so adept at not seeing? What if we have we reached the limits to growth?

Everyone knows that nothing, absolutely nothing, can grow forever. Ask your child or your aging grandparent whether they believe that infinite growth is possible and chances are that, like our economic experts, they haven’t actually thought about it - but common sense tells us that no, nothing actually does. Wait a minute, there is one very relevant example of unlimited growth isn’t there, the cancer cell.

The concept of “Limits to Growth” has been around for a long time, going back to political economist Thomas Malthus, but was particularly hi-lighted in a report by a global think tank known as the Club of Rome, founded in 1968. The report was published in 1972 and the two major conclusions follow:

1. If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.

2. It is possible to alter these growth trends and to establish a condition of ecological and economic stability that is sustainable far into the future. The state of global equilibrium could be designed so that the basic material needs of each person on earth are satisfied and each person has an equal opportunity to realize his individual human potential.

What if the economic collapse we are presently experiencing is a warning shot for worse to come, courtesy of Mother Nature? No satisfactory explanation has been forthcoming as to why everything went down the plughole so far and so fast, unless you accept the one about banks lending money to people who hadn’t snowball’s chance of paying them off. This was a symptom, not a cause.

It’s not as if we haven’t observed any of the ecological consequences already, we have simply chosen to ignore them. A trite excuse, often trotted out after a massive oil spill or yet another of those pesky species extinctions is, “Well, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs”. We all accept placidly that “progress” must continue. But is it really progress when the very pillars of human existence – clean air, potable water, healthy soils - are being toppled on a daily basis with no guarantee that they can ever be restored?

Is it progress when, year on year, there are more starving people or the planet, fewer forests on the land and less fish in the oceans? Why do we speak of “the good old days” but make no effort to redeem them? Sure, we don’t die from the black death or polio anymore – at least in western counties – but we do complain about mental depression, family breakup, traffic jams, urban smog and the ubiquitous speeding up of everything.

The second paragraph from the Club of Rome report is optimistic that things can be reversed and we can actually live sustainably. But the cultural changes that are necessary go totally counter to the trends of the last century which are premised on the belief that we can do whatever we want, and there are no consequences. It’s as if we have not evolved as a species beyond adolescence and, unfortunately, the human race doesn’t have an equivalent of parental guidance to restrain our impulses.

One prescription for the economic meltdown blues is that we move to a Green Economy, although a clear definition of this is not yet forthcoming. The only thing that can be confidently said about greening the economy is that it will be a lot like going back to the future. The old way of living in cooperation with the natural order kept humanity going for about a million years without our self-destruction - perhaps it would be wise to take note of that.

However, there are clearly certain directions that humanity must take if we hope to stick around or, more critical for the present, return to a solid economic foundation:

• End our dependence on fuels that were sequestered in the earth millions of years ago:  bring back mass public transit, walk, bike, eat low on the food chain, insulate our homes, travel less and travel sustainably .
• Learn to live within our ecological footprint: stop making consumption our life purpose, refuse waste, eat and live locally.
• Aim for a steady state (zero growth) economy: stop using the antiquated measuring tool, the Gross Domestic Product, (GDP) that got us into this mess in the first place and adopt something that truly reflects human well being, the Genuine Progress Indicator, (GPI).

One of the main proponents of the GPI is an economist who lives right here in Edmonton, Mark Anielski. His best-selling book, called The Economics of Happiness, shows us how the GDP is clearly not serving us at all well. By putting a monetary value on everything from the Exxon Valdis spill to your last heart attack, the GDP is not a valid or accurate indicator of human progress. Alternatively, the GPI has pluses and minuses – after all shouldn’t we be measuring good health as a credit and deforestation as a debit?

So are we at the limits of growth? To answer that, simply ask the following questions:

• Will we be able to continue creating ever more land-fills, putting every kind of stuff (toxic and otherwise) into them for our grandchildren to sort out?
• How many rivers not reaching the ocean can we tolerate before the alarm goes off?
• At what point do we recognize that destroying the forests of the world to wipe our backsides is really stupid?
• When do we realize that what we laughably refer to as food is hardly distinguishable from the packaging that it comes in?
• Is it really wise to continue the uncontrolled experiment of pumping heat trapping gases into our atmosphere without considering that there just might be some adverse consequences?
• How much land should we give over to concrete and asphalt before reaching a point where there is nowhere left to grow food?
• Is it fair that we 20% in the west control 80% of all the worlds resources, whilst the other four fifths scratch out a living on a few dollars a day – and bear the major burden of ecological collapse?
• How many species have to disappear before we start to notice they are gone?

If these few questions can be reconciled and the conscience remains clear, then perhaps we haven’t yet reached the Limits of Growth. However, for the significant and growing minority of those who lose sleep over such conundrums, who are worried that without a radical reshaping of society we are setting ourselves up for a bleak future, for these people we are rapidly descending into a hole from which it will be impossible to get out of.