Many people with whom I speak are somewhere between scared and terrified about the economic meltdown. They are wondering how it would be possible to get by with less. Their budgets are already at bare bones. It’s long past time to start considering, in detail, how we can deal with an economy that will run dramatically slower than anything most of us have ever experienced.
In his recent article at Harpers Magazine, Fear of fallowing: The specter of a no-growth world, [1] Steven Stoll reminds us of the huge downside of the “growth” economy that we’ve come to know and love, as well as the benefits of living in a no-growth economy.
First of all, here’s a reminder of where our pro-growth, slash, burn, consume-and-discard economy has been leading us:
Groundwater is alarmingly low in regions all over the world, but the most immediate threat to growth is surely petroleum. The world consumption of oil is 84 million barrels a day. American cars alone consume 21 million. Yet even though worldwide production has peaked and prices now hover around $100 per barrel, there is no substitute for oil—nothing stands ready to replace even 10 percent of present consumption. Fossil fuels underwrite our material lives. Long before we deplete all known deposits, their escalating cost could make our highly dispersed, energy-intensive economic geography unworkable. Oil is not simply implicated in everything we call growth. There has never been growth without it.
Consider, too, the world’s fisheries. The planetary marine catch increased from 19 million tons a year in 1950 to 80 million tons by 1990. . . . In 1991 the cod fishery collapsed; . . . Fishermen now catch fewer fish than they did in 1950 . . . .
These statistics don’t lie. We are entering a time when economies will no longer grow like they have in the past. The current mindset of economists and bankers is that the “lack of growth is tantamount to the end of progress.” But is that true? Is there really no other form of progress than the “progress” associated with profligate depletion of limited and precious natural resources? In search of answers, Stoll reviews several recent books, including Bill McKibben’s more recent book, Deep Economy. Here’s what Stoll has determined:
What would it mean to live in a no-growth economy? How might that change the culture of abundance? In Deep Economy, Bill McKibben . . .argues against the troubled union between more and better. . . . Once people have the security of enough food, adequate shelter, access to education, and consumer goods sufficient to allow them to be comfortable and productive, more ceases to be better; it ceases to increase happiness, as Mc Kibben goes to lengths to argue. Surveys over the past six decades have found that Americans’ happiness peaked in the 1950s. It fell five percentage points between 1970 and 1994, even amid the flush times of the Clinton boom. Americans report every imaginable familial and occupational misery regardless of their burgeoning possessions. In the United Kingdom and Japan, economies that expanded powerfully after World War II, satisfaction has remained flat in spite of all the consumer electronics, cable TV stations, first-rate food, and designer clothing now available. The point is not that growth has caused depression and anxiety, writes Mc Kibben, “only that it didn’t alleviate them.”Growth should meet basic needs because these really do create happiness, but beyond that, it fails to deliver.
McKibben quotes the deputy environment minister [of China] admitting that the great economic miracle “will end soon because the environment can no longer keep pace.” Growth at such an expense is not economic, as Daly puts it, but uneconomic—greater in its negative externalities than in its positive returns.
McKibben sees a silver lining in the demise of the pro-growth economic model, a model that continues to suffocate due to the depleted environment it has created:
Deep Economy is about solutions, and its most pointed solution is community autonomy. . . . Community thinking . . . stresses the internalizing of resources and consequences. Rather than depend on the deforestation of some other place for food, to what extent can a town dedicate its own land for its own needs? What would we do if energy came from our own solar budget, our own forests, our own thermal sinks in our own back yards—not from Nigeria or West Virginia? In a world reeling from the effects of export capitalism, nothing could be more stable than people taking responsibility for their own demands on the biosphere. An economist might counter that no town or county can fulfill all its own needs. True, but each reduction in the number of imported goods—and the distance they travel—makes a community both more autonomous and more accountable. McKibben believes that we can thrive, not just survive, without growth. The view may not be popular, but it is gaining.
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