“Countering human epidemic of unlimited economic growth”
The December 31st edition of Newsday reported the U.S. Census Bureau’s latest projection of a “modest (U.S. population) increase of .77% from a year ago” to 322,702,018 as of January 1st, 2016. That article then provided the observation of economic expert William H. Frey, Senior Fellow at the Metropolitan Policy Program of the Brookings Institute — well capturing the conventional economic wisdom — that “I absolutely think that this kind of (population) growth is necessary to sustain the economy.”
But, with the world’s population now in excess of 7.3 billion people, and growing, is there not something very fundamentally wrong with a system that requires continuing population growth to maintain a healthy economy? As we noted in the LIPC’s 1996 report “LI 2020: a Greenprint for a Sustainable Economy,” there cannot be unlimited growth on a finite planet. If we cannot find an economic equilibrium in which a steady state economy can provide for human wellbeing, then human civilization is on a collision course with the ecological capacity of the planet.
In fact, the human species, having effectively destroyed all of the ecological competitors that might keep its numbers in check — except, perhaps, its microbial adversaries, or its own self-destructive political or ideological antagonisms — we find ourselves in the evolutionary position of constituting a human epidemic, inevitably driven to destroy the very ecological conditions that make this earth habitable for humans and other living things.
For what else is unlimited population growth but a human epidemic? And can we not see the entire economic history beginning with the 16th century commercial and the 17th century industrial revolutions as a kind of Ponzi scheme built on the assumption of unlimited natural resources for unending economic growth?
But the natural resources of the planet are not infinite, nor is the Earth’s “carrying capacity.” And an economic system that is premised on such unending growth cannot avoid coming into increasing confrontation with the Earth’s ecological constraints, evidence of which is increasingly all around us. It is thus incumbent upon us as a species to address this fundamental antagonism between our prevailing economic order and the capacity of the Earth to sustain decent human living conditions. We need to begin to radically transform our economy into one that is ecologically sustainable, not dependent upon unending growth in population and in the exploitation of the Earth’s natural resources and environmental cycles.
There are some hopeful — though so far, far too faint — signs of this necessary re-ordering of priorities and social order. The recent international climate accord is one, as is the growing world-wide movement spearheaded by grassroots organizations such as 350.org. And emerging campaigns such as The Next System Project, directed at building community wealth through cooperative community economic development, while still far too weak, do offer a hopeful vision that needs to be built upon, and “brought to scale.” And that cannot be done so long as we continue to promote the kind of corporate globalization embodied in the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, and the vast disparities in wealth and power that these efforts embody. But of all this, and more, in future posts.
dsprintz 