"A politician and a naturalist were discussing the future of Thjórsárver. Thjórsárver is a world heritage site. The river Thjórsá flows from the glacier and runs through a dip in the highlands, creating a unique area of mountain wetlands, a sudden oasis of green in the bleak black desert of central Iceland. These wetlands are the most important nesting site in the world for the pink-footed goose. There were plans to build a dam and submerge a large part of the area to generate electricity for a new aluminium plant in Hvalfjörđur.
"The naturalist was saying how important this area was for Iceland, and for the world, and for the future of one of the world's most attractive species of geese. To which the politician countered with the 'need to ensure economic growth'. The naturalist tried to enter an objection: '...but do we absolutely need economic growth?' And with that his case was lost, and the politician smiled avuncularly. The politician was being 'realistic': his views were founded on logic and broad perspective. The naturalist was being 'unrealistic', blinded by romanticism and the narrow self-interest of his particular field.
-- Andri Snœr Magnason, Dreamland, 2006, p71.
Economic growth.
The economy in the world today is based on growth. The globalized capitalist system relies on economic growth to continue. Trade, progress, markets, industry, mining, politics, consumption, cities, food—everything today relies upon it. When economic growth slows we get a recession. When it stagnates we get a depression, "with all the desperation and hardship that these words imply". (Naomi Klein, "Capitalism vs. the Climate", The Nation, Nov 2011)
The fear of a depression is crippling to society. On hearing that word, people retreat from the things they most care about, in order to focus on the 'more important' problem. After all, who wants to be against job creation in times of unemployment? Who is for spiralling debt, whether personal or national?
We've seen the effect of this. In 2007 'being green' was in the news, 'eco' was hip, and global action was seen to be urgently needed. Celebrities attending the Academy Awards arrived in hybrids and even politicians dared to engage green issues. But that all changed. With the economic collapse of 2008, all focus was lost. The environment has barely been in the news since, except to cover the failure of Copenhagen in 2009. People aren't interested any more. The coverage of climate change in the media is barely 20% of what it was.
Instead, we are daily bombarded by financial news. The markets have taken the focus from every other issue. And it's not surprising. The markets have unprecedented power in the world, and they are in massive trouble. Their foundational ideology is being questioned as they collide with a sharp rocks of reality. And the reality is, economics based on continual growth doesn't work—the world is finite, and it won't indefinitely supply new markets to expand into.
The idea of economic growth is a metaphor, taken from the living world around us. Trees grow. People grow. Plants, insects and animals grow. They all start small, add to their size by consuming nutrients and resources found in the world around them, and hopefully, they eventually become healthy, adult living beings. But then they do something that our economy refuses to do:
Stop growing.
Once a living creature reaches adulthood, its size doesn't increase. It's growth period is over, and the majority of its life is still ahead of it. At this point, it's reached a relatively-sustainable size. If trees continue to grow past a certain point, they might receive more sunlight for a short period of time, but when the storms come, it will be these over-sized trees that crack in the wind, unable to support their own weight. It's the biggest trees that come crashing down.
Our economic system is more than a tree—it's an entire forest. Nearly everything that can be exploited for growth has been exploited. There are no more significant resources in the world that will be found to keep it growing. And those that are left—agricultural land, oceanic life, biodiversity, and a stable climate—are quickly being used up, breaking down, and reaching their limits.
The economic system has reached the point that it is being artificially kept alive. The massive bailouts of public money that have been donated to private coffers are nothing more than economic life support. They're the last steroid that we can give, the final stimulus that can be used to keep the aged cell walls from collapsing. The era of economic growth is over. It is time for this economic paradigm to pass away, and for a new economic paradigm to take its place.
So where does that leave us? Not communism—that system has already repeatedly failed, and its exploitation of the natural world was at times worse than capitalism. And not libertarianism, civilizational collapse, or anarchy—these just leave the rich and powerful free to prey on the weak.
Instead, we need a new set of policies, laws, methods of economic calculation, and governmental systems that take account of, and respect, nature. We need, as Naomi Klein argues, "an alternative worldview to rival the one at the heart of the ecological crisis—this time, embedded in interdependence rather than hyper-individualism, reciprocity rather than dominance and cooperation rather than hierarchy." "The way out is to embrace a managed transition to another economic paradigm, using all the tools of planning discussed above. Growth would be reserved for parts of the world still pulling themselves out of poverty."
This kind of change of worldview is not easy, but it's also not impossible. We live in an emergent world, a world where the present is an ongoing process, and where history is crafted by the choices we make—when combined with our visions of the future.
So what do we need to achieve this? The problem may seem insurmountable, but when broken down into parts, it starts to fit inside our collective imaginations, and so allow us to move away from the grim future promised by deregulated capitalism.
For example, we need to take the money out of politics. We need to re-regulate the markets, and make the markets work for the public good. We need more planning. We need more accountability in governments, and we need to give governments more power. We need to not only increase taxes on the rich (globally, so they have no tax-havens to run to), we also need to make it clear that those billionaires who hold the capital will be the ones who pay for many of the changes that need to be made. We'll allow them to become philanthropists.
But these changes won't just happen—quite the contrary; they'll be strongly opposed (violently at times) by many in the 1%—and those in the 99% they've convinced to do their work for them. The necessary changes require action from you. They'll need you to start writing to your local elected officials—at least twice monthly. They'll need you to switch your bank accounts (and your company's if you have the chance) away from the worst offenders—Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, etc. They will require social movements like Occupy Wall St—and at times they'll need you to leave your day job to go down and join them. And if you really feel incapable of doing nothing else at the moment, at least sign up to several clicktivist sites: Avaaz, 38degrees, 350.org, change.org (but know that clicktivism is only a start—it'll never be enough).
Our future doesn't need to be the grim future of economic and planetary death promised by capitalism. Indeed, de-regulated capitalism is on its death-bed, and the obituary of business-as-usual will soon be written. It's up to you to start preparing for the economics of decline, and to start moving towards a future of interdependence and sustainability. Begin today!
Although I think your analogy is accurate enough I would counsel against using the "growth" metaphor at all, even to disprove the way it is used today in economic discussions. My reasoning is twofold.
ReplyDeleteFirstly, "growth" has lots of positive connotations in addition to its use in an economic sense, which is what makes it attractive to think of and use as a simile for "economic health". To even use the term is to agree to a field of battle where the opponent has an advantage. If the economic growth metaphor/theory is inadequate to the task it is not ground one should desire to win anyway except to deny it to the opponent, and there are other, easier ways to deny that ground to the opponent.
Secondly, when we talk of the environment we are using "growth" in a Malthusian sense but when we talk of economics we are using it in the GDP-linked economic theory sense. These are two totally different things but using the same word for them conflates them in ways that muddle perceptions, especially in our 160 character and 3 second sound bite world.
I would like to see us abandon "growth" as a measure of economic health and replace it with "affordability", which I would define as an index derived from a ratio between cost of living and income. The term "housing affordability" is already widely used so this is just an extension of an already familiar idea and shouldn't be difficult to popularise. It's also a term that can be understood by just about anyone (unlike "growth" which requires a degree in macroeconomic voodoo to actually understand).
This would change the field of battle enormously. Without the concept of growth the concept of recession needs to be expressed more directly; basically, for what it actually is: too little circulation of money. We could refer to that as just "circulation".
Once this is understood it's easy to ask the question "who is keeping it from circulating? It's also easier to see economy in terms of labour rather than mysteriously sourced revenues (which we perpetually see as only taxation or debt).
Listening to people it's not hard to detect the simple ideas that are at the limit of most people's ideas about economy. The idea that there's "too little money" is common, and it's a general sense that supports a narrative of poverty, creating paralytic fear that is exploited to disempower the electorate. I don't blame people for simple thinking. We have to be reductive in order to function at all, but it is in the interest of the few to keep the language of discussion and inaccessible and inaccurate. Change the language and change the discussion.
How does this benefit the environmental discussuon though? I would say that by demystifying economic discussion it becomes far more difficult to oppose environmentally friendly behaviours. Rather than a discussion tinged with fear about where the money is going to come from we have a discussion about labour allocation, and being basically cooperative creatures who basically *want* to do right by the environment and each other, that is more intuitively appealing.
I'm going to stop now, before this essay becomes a novella...
Thanks for commenting. You're completely right that growth is a positive-loaded term, but I'm not sure we can deny economists talking about growth. Because of the word's appeal, the economists and their PR will continue to use the word since it benefits them, and it already has large support and acceptance as an economic term. I'd like to deny them the word, but I don't think we're able.
ReplyDeleteGrowth in the economic sense is a highly complicated word, but unfortunately it is often abused to simply bolster the cause of the economist/politician who uses it. It's on my 'abusive word list', along with 'terrorist' and 'honestly' - whenever those words are used, I know the person using them is trying to manipulate me, and so I distrust everything they say, and probably disregard it entirely.
I like 'affordability' as an alternative, but then it runs into problems. What should be affordable? Food often takes up 5% of a (western) person's income, yet 100 years ago it was more like 30%. Maybe it should be 30%? Or should it be more like 2%, so that a second car becomes 'affordable'? We already have the Consumer Price Index, but people don't really pay attention to it.
Affordability also doesn't take into account the amount of built-up capital and infrastructure a society has, and whether that c&i is being increased or eroded. I think that's an important absence that needs including.
I agree that we need to see things more in terms of labour than in terms of 'who is going to pay for it?' Good point well made.