and sustainability would likely remain on the periphery of public discussion and debate. In light of the seriousness of the economic, environmental and social issues that we face, this would be a serious loss, depriving the public and our governments of frameworks of thought and principles of action needed to guide us through these difficult and challenging times.
Of course, sustainability is not really a new idea. It has been the mantra of farmers and foresters for a very long time. That it should be applied to considerations of the economy is, however, more recent, dating back to the 1980s. Degrowth is even newer, only about 15 years old. Wayne Ellwood explains what these ideas mean and why we should pay attention to them. If you are curious about them, as I hope you are, then do read on.
Peter A Victor PhD, Professor in Environmental Studies, York University, Toronto, Canada
CONTENTS
2. Sources, sinks and services
3. Climate change and carbon footprints
4. Peak oil and tar sands
5. Profits, debt and the growth imperative
6. GDP and happiness
7. Life on the treadmill
8. On the road to degrowth
Resources and organizations
Index
The warning signals flash briefly across our TV and computer screens; scattered headlines appear in our newspapers and magazines. The messages are disparate but unambiguous: ‘Natural disasters forced 32 million from their homes in 2012’; ‘Pollution threatens world’s poor’; ‘Why the world’s weather will be going to extremes’; ‘Inequality undermines democracy’; ‘Burnt-out planet or financial doom?’; ‘Record urban growth poses challenge’.
The facts on the ground tell a disturbing story, if we choose to listen. But life gets in the way – school, family, work, the daily battle to survive – so few of us make the time to connect the dots.
Until recently that included me. A few years ago I researched and edited a special issue of New Internationalist magazine on economic growth. I’d read widely on sustainability and dipped into the burgeoning field of ecological economics so it was a natural segue. Plus I’ve been a keen student of economics most of my adult life, wading through the business pages, gamely trying to keep up with the twists and turns of the global economy, tracking how the rich and powerful manipulate the system to their advantage. I’m an amateur, but even highly trained, professional economists rarely step outside the dominant paradigm. Combing through the critical literature on growth I began to pay attention to the big picture. It wasn’t long before the scattered bits of information began to gel into a coherent whole.
A clear line emerged, connecting the dominant growth model to world-shaking social and environmental issues: widespread habitat destruction, the loss of biodiversity, chaotic shifts in global weather, the steady depletion of natural resources, growing income inequality, the debt-laden and crisis-prone global economy. The more I read, the more I discovered all these things circled back to growth.
Then I began to think: maybe growth is not the solution to our problems, maybe it is the problem. And the reason we can’t see that is because we’re thoroughly immersed in a worldview that says the only way to prosperity and well-being is by growing and expanding the economy.
Forever.
But as the pioneering economist and systems analyst, Kenneth Boulding, once said: ‘Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.’ Nearly 50 years ago, Boulding saw the writing on the wall. In his 1966 essay, The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth, he described the ‘closed’ economy of the future ‘in which the earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything, either for extraction or for pollution, and in which, therefore, man must find his place in a cyclical ecological system’.
A failure of imagination
Humankind as one part of a cyclical ecological system: that notion now seems both logical and obvious. We know intuitively that nature and culture are co-dependent. We are beginning to understand that we cannot destroy the planet without destroying ourselves. Yet the gap between understanding and action is hard to bridge. Inertia is a powerful barrier to change. The growth system continues to define the contours of our world. This is as much a failure of imagination as of policy.
A few years after Kenneth Boulding, another radical critique of economic orthodoxy surfaced in the best-selling Limits to Growth, a ground-breaking study that had the moxie to suggest that growth carried within it the seeds of its own destruction.
The idea that human enterprise was bounded by bio-physical limits was a wake-up call that provided fuel for an embryonic environmental movement. But it was soon forgotten in the giddy surge of deregulated markets that exploded in the 1980s. Barriers to the free flow of capital were eliminated; financial speculators ruled in a computerized world, holding entire countries to ransom. The ethos of unlimited consumerism easily migrated across borders in the digital era. Giant factory trawlers vacuumed the seas. Vast monocultures of genetically modified crops fed by petrochemicals replaced native grasslands and forests. Deep-pocketed mining companies expanded their restless search for resources from the Arctic to the Amazon. It was, in other words, growth as usual.
The argument that the resources of the Earth have a limit is self-evident. More to the point, as the environmental footprint analysis shows us, we are already past those limits, consuming irreplaceable natural capital at a rate that is jeopardizing the well-being of future generations. We have put growth ahead of sustainability to the extent that sustainability has become a marketing tool, an excuse for more of the same. We can no longer grow the economy and strive for sustainability. The two concepts are mutually exclusive.
Economic meltdown
The failure of the dominant growth model has been painfully evident since the global economy collapsed in 2008. Triggered by footloose investors, a weak regulatory structure, delusional bankers and an enormous US real-estate bubble, the whole creaking edifice teetered on the brink of disaster. The global credit web, the circulatory system of world capitalism, slipped into paralysis as major banks hunkered down and refused to lend to each other.
With the ghost of the Great Depression of the 1930s hovering in the background, politicians eventually saw the light and closed ranks. In Europe, North America, Australasia – even in China – governments injected massive
