An Ecologically Incoherent Fairy Tale
12/2/21
Hello everyone:
This week in curated Anthropocene news,
Kinship is a Verb: A beautiful Orion conversation between Robin Wall Kimmerer, John Hausdoerfer, and Gavin von Horn on our actual place in the community of life, drawn from their own writing and their work co-editing the series of books, Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations.
A Bad Solar System: From Yale e360, why are we clear-cutting forests and co-opting farmland and other good habitats to set up solar farms? Placement should be prioritized, if not mandated, for sites like parking lots and other wastelands.
All of the Above: From The Overpopulation Project, a review of a study that outlines the ways in which growth in population and consumption are entwined, and concludes that we need to be addressing both together.
Circular Logic: From the New York Times, the climate benefits of roundabouts, to which we here in the U.S. (other than Indiana) are strangely resistant.
Abundant Thoughts: Here’s a fine personal essay from Kathleen Sullivan, another Maine writer on Substack, digging into her relationship with Anthropocene abundance.
Now on to this week’s essay:
This week I’ll paint myself into a corner, and then see if I can write my way out. The unpainted corner in question involves economics, an art (science?) well beyond my ken. (Please correct my assumptions or conclusions as necessary in the Comments.) The economic concept that interests me is the “ecologically incoherent fairy tale” of constant growth. Constant growth, or “growthism,” posits that an economy is only healthy or beneficial if it is expanding. More interestingly, advocates for growth seem to have the bizarre unstated belief that measurable productivity and growth are the purpose of human society.
Despite enormous flaws (planetary-scale, really), constant growth is an idea on a high pedestal. So I’m here to poke it with a stick.
Growth is not merely the mantra of modern economies – studied and reported breathlessly – it is the goal, the goad, the god. The holy trinity of the doctrine of constant macroeconomic growth might be the letters GDP (Gross Domestic Product). The logic of growthism apparently demands annual growth of at least 3% to avoid recession, which means doubling the size of the economy every 23 years. By this logic, the economy at the end of this century will be 20 times larger than the economy of 2000, while the economy a century later, in 2200, will be 370 times larger than in 2000.
The consequences for the planet have been, in part, what we’re calling the Anthropocene: a transformation of continents, oceans, and atmosphere so intensive that in a geological blink we’ve created a geological signature. We’ve made the oceans 30% more acidic, cut in half the production of terrestrial vegetation, and made a habit of pumping a supervolcano’s worth of CO2 into the skies every year.
Using GDP as a guiding measure of civilizational health has been the equivalent of letting our GPS navigate us off a cliff. GDP is a measure of forward progress without any assessment of the world around us or compassion for the reality awaiting us. It’s also a fine example of the difference between a logical idea (the GPS is a map – we’ll follow it) and a rational idea (we’ll do it with our eyes closed). As Alexander Zaitchik noted a year ago in an excellent article in The New Republic,
GDP does not distinguish between productive and destructive behavior. A measure of an economy’s total consumer and government spending, investments, exports, and imports, it institutionalized the celebration of a soulless and dangerously incomplete ledger.
GDP is as oblivious to the environmental costs of progress as it is ignorant of the benefits of the unpaid labor that enriches our lives and communities: child-rearing and other domestic work, caring for sick relatives and neighbors, growing and raising our own food, etc. In other words, GDP and its metric of constant growth are rooted entirely in the abstraction of fiscal wealth rather than in the quality of our lives and the health of life on Earth.
Zaitchik’s article was largely a review of Jason Hickel’s 2021 book, Less is More, a history and critique of constant growth. Hickel provides some real-world examples of the lunacy of GDP as a metric:
If you cut down a forest for timber, GDP goes up. If you extend the working day and push back the retirement age, GDP goes up. If pollution causes hospital visits to rise, GDP goes up. But GDP includes no cost accounting. It says nothing about the loss of the forest as habitat for wildlife, or as a sink for emissions. It says nothing about the toll that too much work and pollution takes on people’s bodies and minds.
No surprise, then, that Hickel believes that constant growth isn’t compatible with maintaining a stable climate or healthy, diverse community of life. It never has been. But it has nonetheless dominated human affairs for nearly a century, a century that has quadrupled human population and brought about the Great Acceleration in the decline of Earth’s systems. “Growthism,” he says, is “one of the most hegemonic ideologies in modern history.”
He means that, with few exceptions, the entire political spectrum under capitalism has supported this idea of constant growth. It has been as important to the cosseted autocrats and kleptocrats who siphon funds and freedoms from their people as it has for the earnest social democrats who support a broad social safety net.
And yet there is no natural or historical basis for long-term constant growth. In no rational observation of reality will you find the idea that constant growth of anything exists as a healthy natural phenomenon. Where it does exist, it’s unsustainable. Metastatic cancers and infectious pandemics spread, then either kill or exhaust their hosts. Mountain ranges rise, then erode. Invasive species spread, then coexist or crash. Fires rage through landscapes, then wink out. “It is astonishing, when you think about it,” Hickel notes, “that the dominant belief in economics holds that no matter how rich a country has become, their GDP should keep rising, year after year, with no identifiable end point.”
This is a bit of an aside, but Hickel outlines a fascinating history behind the march toward constant growth. We’ve been taught to imagine capitalism as an extension of human nature, a ramping up of intensive resource extraction that we began countless generations ago, but that ignores the basic fact that for most of human history our species existed in small numbers living within ecological bounds. Hickel maintains that the dawn of constant growth appeared out of a brutal repression by European elites of a progressive era that began after the Black Death. For 150 years after that pandemic, the peasants who shared natural resources in common apparently had a decent quality of life with plenty of leisure time. After the crackdown, though, the commons was divided up among the powerful, “idleness” was outlawed, and feudalism was legislated. The result was large-scale poverty, starvation, reduction in life expectancy, and a societal mandate for excessive resource use. The European forces that initiated this proto-capitalism would soon, through their colonial exploits, set the economic parameters for modern life around the globe.
In 1972, researchers at MIT were asked to assess how this global economic experiment was going. They performed a landmark computer-based analysis of the interaction between human impacts (e.g. population, resource use, and pollution) and Earth systems in order to assess the risk of a societal collapse due to overexploitation of resources. Their modeling found repeatedly that if we didn’t alter our growth-dependent high-consumption and high-population path, we’d likely suffer widespread societal decline sometime in the middle of the 21st century. The researchers knew there were likely to be flaws in their knowledge, calculations, and interpretations, but they also knew that no matter how they tweaked the inputs they came up with the same result. They and their funders decided that the world should know what they knew.
The Introduction to The Limits to Growth, as the book based on the 1972 report was titled, listed the report’s three general conclusions:
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.
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.
If the world's people decide to strive for this second outcome rather than the first, the sooner they begin working to attain it, the greater will be their chances of success.
It’s a little frustrating to read this half-century-old recommendation to hurry up and change our ways. Human population was less than half what it is now, and the world’s coral reefs, grasslands, kelp and mangrove forests, glaciers, and rainforests were still largely intact.
As you might imagine, the MIT researchers’ conclusions did not sit well with anyone enamored by or profiting from a world built on growth. Criticism of the report’s assumptions, data, and “pessimism” came from all sides – from economists whose core logic was threatened, from industries whose business-as-usual was threatened, from conservatives aligned with industry, from the Catholic Church upset that more babies were considered dangerous, and even from leftists afraid that the report undermined prospects for growth-based improvements for workers – but much of the condemnation misinterpreted the study. The public, anyway, was more eager to hear the bad news, with more than 30 million copies of Limits to Growth sold worldwide.
The rational analysis of Limits to Growth was ridiculed in many circles for the next few decades. An optimism rooted in pro-growth economics has consistently assumed that the cliff our GPS is aiming for either won’t be that high or will somehow be avoided. But a small and steady stream of reviews of the original analysis has consistently found it to be accurate, particularly as real-world data from the future it described has become available. Over the last 20 years, especially, the Limits to Growth model has found increasing validation. In 2008, an Australian physicist published a study titled “A Comparison of ‘The Limits to Growth’ with Thirty Years of Reality,” and found its assumptions and conclusions were still reliable.
Most recently, a 2020 study updated that review with another 20 years of data, and again found that the threat to humanity that appeared in the MIT modelling still haunts us. It cites specific concerns about “a halt in welfare, food, and industrial production” over the next 10 to 20 years if we don’t change our civilizational habits. In a classic bit of clinical understatement, the study’s abstract notes that these conclusions call into question “the suitability of continuous economic growth as humanity's goal in the twenty-first century.”
To be clear, the Limits to Growth concerns about the trendlines are not specific predictions about our fate. They are increasingly validated descriptions of what should happen if our business-as-usual behavior continues to torque the planet’s biological and physical systems with pollution, population, and consumption. This is a warning, not a fait accompli. For more information, here’s a good article in Vice about the recent study, and here’s an excellent chapter excerpt [pdf download] from a 1999 book, Believing Cassandra, about the original MIT computer analysis.
I borrowed the phrase “ecologically incoherent fairy tale” from Alexander Zaitchik’s review of Jason Hickel’s Less is More. Hickel calls growthism a fairy tale, and Zaitchik added the descriptor. Zaitchik, who doesn’t pull his punches, noted that comparing growthism to a fairy tale “is, if anything, too generous, since children’s stories usually involve some kind of moral lesson applicable to the real world.”
And the real world is where I want to spend the last part of this week’s writing. I’ll drop my stick and step away from the pedestal.
The more I think about the impacts of the constant growth fever dream, the more I think back to the essay I wrote several weeks ago that discussed the difficulty of being ensnared in a world structured by values we do not share. Growthism impacts every aspect of our lives: employment, education, children, shopping, investments, politics, ethics, and the built and natural environments, to name a few. It isn’t just that these aspects of our daily lives are all entwined with the abstract and growth-dependent financial froth conjured up by central banks, investment firms, corporate shareholders, etc., whose goal is to sustain the froth rather than our daily lives. It’s that the lives we inhabit largely exist within a false hypothesis about the primacy of the economy.
We have to remember that economies are always subsystems of finite ecological systems. Without resources, an economy cannot exist. The problem occurs when the subsystem imagines itself as infinite. Which means that an economy, as modern humans have so far conceived it, can only degrade ecology. It doesn’t have to be this way, of course, but it’s hard for a coal-fired train to wander off its tracks in search of a higher power…
Growthism even frames our very idea of what it means to live. We see ourselves, consciously or unconsciously, within an ever-expanding human world which must never shrink. We’ve been born into lives within a system that is designed not to account for its global environmental and human costs, that calls its process “progress” but is (in terms of impacts) a march toward destruction, and that inflicts upon most of humanity a pervasive anxiety about earning enough to survive or thrive. Constant growth, after all, requires constant pressure.
That financial anxiety predates the now additional environmental anxiety of the Anthropocene. So many of us are stressed by what we see around us, and by what we read about the world we love. (I’m here to help, I swear…)
Constant growth has been a convenient fiction borne out of a desire for unlimited power. I don’t mean some small, ever-changing group of hyper-wealthy people who are the societal descendants of the European elite who crushed the progressive post-pandemic peasantry centuries ago. I’m talking about a particular human weakness which in a quirk of fate became written into stone with the Industrial Revolution and is now being written into the geology of the Earth. This weakness – to selfishly accumulate wealth and power rather than maintain resilient human and natural communities – became the civilizational logic of capitalism and GDP.
When protesters of all political stripes rail against corporations which maximize profit over people – whether these companies are downsizing in Michigan, poisoning groundwater in India, or fossil-fuel investing in Manhattan – they’re up against not just powerful organizations defended by slanted laws and policies, but subsidiaries of the constant growth ideology. Corporations are merely doing what constant growth asks us all to do: build wealth at almost any cost.
We’re asked to participate in the fiction of constant growth despite the fact that it is often not in our own self-interest, or a recipe for human well-being. Looking back over the last two centuries of capitalism, we can point to the astonishing increase of life expectancy, to medical advances, to food technology and distribution, particularly in the wealthiest nations, but it’s entirely possible that an economy conceived around stability and designed to increase well-being rather than wealth would have achieved the same successes, and others, without the ecological cost. Moreover, there’s a lot of data showing that beyond a certain level of comfort neither growth nor wealth make an individual, a family, or a society happy. For example, Costa Rica’s per capita income is about 17% of income in the U.S., but its people live longer, healthier lives because the nation prioritizes public health.
And so Costa Rica’s healthcare system shows us a path forward. The vision of a civilization powered by renewable energy shows us a path forward too. As do concerted efforts by you, your neighbors, and people across the world to reduce pollution, improve agricultural practices, recycle mined materials, and restore biodiverse habitats. And so do the warnings from ecologists and The Limits to Growth analysis about the path we’re on.
Taken together, that’s a bright light in the Anthropocene. The necessary tasks of regenerating human and natural communities, drawing down greenhouse gas emissions, and building equity into the social contract are also steps toward reducing the hegemony of growthism. An economy built on a frame of human equity and ecological limits is no longer your grandfather’s capitalism.
So what does the future of growth look like? Should we tweak the growth model to reduce its impacts or get rid of it entirely to create a “steady-state economy” or, more radically, enter a period of “degrowth”? That’s a debate I’ll introduce you to next week.
As always, thanks for sticking with me.
Hello Jason,
Growth as a goal, or at least as a measure of success was something I had to fight almost continuously during my time at the school. Whether it was in a board meeting or interacting with educational consultants and other school leaders, there would be a suggestion that more students meant more tuition and that, in turn, would provide for a bigger facility and more services. This would allow us to afford all kinds of neat things and attract even more students. The key to arguing against this successfully was to be really clear about the mission and vision of the school. These seem like kind or vague terms to most people but in the non-profit world, they are the backbone on which the whole structure is built. I don't want to overdo the analogy but I think the roadblock we face at the national level is that we really haven't talked very seriously about mission and vision, they tend to get reduced to campaign slogans. The closest thing I can find to a mission statement for the USA is the Preamble to the Constitution. It lists 6 reasons or goals for having a US government and not one of them is tied to the idea of perpetual growth. If the way we measured our success was directly tied to these 6 goals, we would stand a better chance. As a Democrat, I'd love to make the argument that the US government has become too big in the sense we have strayed from our mission, to take a more originalist point of view and get back to the basics as outlined in our founding document.