The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality (44 page)

It may be cynical to say that policy makers will do the right thing only after all other alternatives have been exhausted.
⁸⁰
But for the solutions we have been discussing, this does seem to be more or less the case. And this is true not just of policy makers, but the majority of us worker bees as well.

Paul Ehrlich and Robert Ornstein made a pioneering effort to understand our species’ inability to pre-respond to impending, foreseeable crises in their book
New World New Mind
(1989), which describes the mismatch between the human nervous system and the complexities of our modern world.
⁸¹
While early hunter-gatherers evolved quick reflexes to cope with immediate threats in a limited environment, people in modern industrial societies face long-range problems not readily apparent to the five senses — growing population, climate change, resource depletion, and proliferation of debt. At their cores, our fight-or-flight brains just aren’t up to dealing with these kinds of slowly developing dilemmas, even though our more advanced cerebral faculties enable us to define both challenge and potential solutions.

A more recent book,
American Mania: When More Is Not Enough
, by neuroscientist Peter Whybrow, digs deeper and reflects more recent research.
⁸²
Whybrow notes that evolution equipped us to seek status and novelty, and to engage in conspicuous consumption. In our species’ past, there were perfectly good reasons for these tendencies: they helped us survive and achieve reproductive success. But today, in a world of over-consumption, they keep us locked into behaviors that actually undermine our survival prospects.

Within our brains, dopamine plays a key role in governing motivation and stimulating the senses of reward and pleasure. On the primordial savanna, we got a hit of dopamine every time we discovered a tasty root or bagged a prey animal; today, stock trading lights up the same brain circuitry. But what helped us survive in one situation imperils us in the other. On the savanna, our early ancestors always needed the next meal, and then the next, and so the dopamine response evolved to be transitory.

But today this means that, for the stock trader, no amount of profit is ever “enough.” When we modern urbanites get a dopamine “hit” from a new car, a bigger house, or an end-of-year bonus, we may know intellectually that Earth simply can’t keep supplying us with ever-increasing flows of such goodies, but it’s hard to stop. We may even say we are “addicted” to shopping or some other aspect of consumption — but what we are really addicted to is the feeling it gives us.

According to Whybrow, Americans are particularly susceptible because they are descended from immigrants with a higher frequency of the “exploratory and novelty-seeking D4-7 allele” in the dopamine receptor system; these immigrants, after all, were individuals who were willing to cross an ocean to pursue opportunity. Americans, he argues, are therefore disproportionately prone to impulsivity and addiction. Whybrow doesn’t condemn Americans, whom he describes as “a self-selected group of hardworking opportunists with an insatiable hunger for self-improvement”; he merely points out that consumerism got its start in the US for reasons that have to do with biology as well as history.

Addiction is closely related to habituation: repeated use of an addictive drug typically leads to higher levels of tolerance. The same is true of dopamine-generating activities. Withdrawal from those activities leads to lower dopamine levels, so continuous acclimation to those activities is required to keep dopamine at normal levels, while a higher “dose” of activity is needed to get achieve the “high” that came the first time around. In his article “The Psychological and Evolutionary Roots of Resource Over-consumption Revisited,” Energy blogger and former hedge-fund manager Nate Hagens writes:

After each upward spike, dopamine levels recede, eventually to below the baseline. The following spike doesn’t go quite as high as the one before it. Over time, the rush becomes smaller, and the crash that follows becomes steeper. The brain has been fooled into “thinking” that achieving that high is equivalent to survival (even more so than with food or sex, which actually
do
contribute to survival) and the “consume” light remains on all the time. Eventually, the brain is forced to turn on a self-defense mechanism, reducing the production of dopamine altogether — thus weakening the pleasure circuits’ intended function. At this point, an “addicted” person is compelled to use the substance not to get high, but just to feel normal — since one’s own body is producing little or no endogenous dopamine response. Such a person has reached a state of anhedonia, or inability to feel pleasure via normal experiences.
⁸³

Just as our brain circuitry can addict us to overconsumption, it also keeps us from responding to slowly accumulating environmental threats. Hagens points out that our brains are adept at calculating risks and rewards, and at applying discount rates according to the timing of events. We give the present predominantly more weight than the future when making decisions: an immediate reward is worth more to us than one promised next year, and an immediate threat will provoke more avoidance effort than one certain to emerge down the line. So even though the cost of averting climate change (in terms of loss to GDP) would be less than the eventual cost of climate change itself, we are generally unwilling to pay that smaller, immediate cost.

The limits to our ability to change behavior to avert crisis come not just from our individual brain wiring but from the psychology of organizations. While people within organizations individually have the characteristics we have been discussing, organizations themselves tend to develop their own defenses again change.

Political organizations, for example, tend to foster a culture in which insiders (politicians) are encouraged to tell outsiders (the people) what the latter want to hear, while withholding information about problems that cannot be solved without substantial sacrifice, or problems that cannot be blamed on other, competing politicians.

Both political and commercial organizations tend to elevate short-term priorities. For corporations, quarterly profits are the prime motivator, while politicians make decisions based on the next election cycle. Ironically, however, absent an immediate military threat, government policy tends to evolve very slowly, regardless of the urgency of the environmental or economic issues facing it.
⁸⁴

On top of all this, there are entrenched interests — people and institutions that profit from the system the way it is, don’t want to give up those profits, and have the means to shape policy and public opinion. This is hardly a trivial point: billions of dollars are spent strategically in lobbying and public relations by corporations and wealthy individuals with the goal of shaping, delaying, or eliminating environmental legislation or reforms of the financial industry.

All of this would seem to suggest that human beings are simply incapable of conserving resources and that we are genetically wired to use the planet up and drive ourselves to extinction. But that’s not entirely true. There are countervailing human tendencies exemplified in the traditions of indigenous peoples who made decisions based on the likely impacts on the seventh generation yet to come. Traditional societies planned ahead, made a virtue of thrift, and in many cases even held voluntary poverty as an ideal.
⁸⁵

These kinds of cultural values evolved slowly in response to environmental limits. During the past two centuries of rapid economic growth, such values have tended to be lost and forgotten. Peter Whybrow explains why:

Selfish behaviors are reward-driven and innate, wired deeply into the survival mechanisms of the primitive brain, and when consistently reinforced, they will run away to greed, with its associated craving for money, food, or power. On the other hand, the self-restraint and the empathy for others that are so important in fostering physical and mental health are learned behaviors — largely functions of the new human cortex and thus culturally dependent. These social behaviors are fragile and learned by imitations much as we learn language.
⁸⁶

All of the solutions to our growth-based problems involve some form of self-restraint. That’s why most of those solutions remain just good ideas. That’s also why we will probably hit the wall, and why the outcomes described in the previous chapters of this book are likely. The sustainability revolution
will
occur. The depletion of nonrenewable resources ensures that humankind will eventually base its economy on renewable resources harvested at rates of natural replenishment. But that revolution will be driven by crisis.

The crucial question is, how serious will that crisis have to be to get our collective attention and force us to change our behavior? Will the crisis be so severe as to destroy the very basis of civilization? If so, we will have lost everything worthwhile that human beings have achieved during our past few centuries of struggle, invention, and inquiry. It need not be so, and by working now to ensure that the tools that are needed to enable the economy and society to adapt to the post-growth era are sharpened and available, we can create the conditions for a rapid response when our collective internal discounting mechanisms finally adjust to the scale of the crisis facing us.

Nevertheless, if some scale of impact is inevitable, this poses profound immediate challenges for individuals, families, and communities. How should we be preparing?

CHAPTER
7

LIFE AFTER GROWTH

There is more to life than increasing its speed.

— Mohandas K. Gandhi

I made the decision to write this book with some trepidation. After all, the world economic system is held together largely by the belief and faith that it will continue to grow. It’s a confidence scheme, in the purest sense. Publishing a book arguing that growth is now effectively impossible (except in limited instances) undermines the belief, faith, and confidence that bind investors, lenders, and borrowers together in a functioning system. It makes a financial-currency crash more likely, and the victims of such a crash would include not just bankers, but nearly everyone.

My staying quiet could help buy time for us all. But there is no assurance that the time so purchased would be used to fix the problems we have been discussing. In fact, governments and central banks have already bought time — several trillion dollars’ worth — but are doing very little to make fundamental changes to our economic system so that it can function in the post-growth era.

Our collective global conversation about the economy needs to change. We need to be thinking and talking about how to adapt to the end of growth. I don’t know how to help catalyze that conversation without first pointing out some inconvenient facts — starting with the fact that our economy currently is set up to fail under the kinds of circumstances that are unfolding around us (resource depletion and catastrophic environmental decline). If political leaders and voices in the major media are unwilling to consider the possibility that growth is ending, then at least this information should be available to receptive individuals and communities so they can prepare themselves for what is coming. This was the argument
for
publication.

Even so, there is irony and risk. The strategies that individuals should be pursuing to prepare for the end of growth (disengaging from consumerism, getting out of debt, becoming more self-sufficient) are things that — if everyone did them — would keep the economy from recovering and would push us further into recession.

When the short-term interests of the economy conflict with the long-term interests of communities, a majority of individuals, and the natural world, we have a dilemma on our hands. In some respects, it is not an entirely new one (this conflict was implicit in Marx’s critique of capitalism), but it is becoming acute and more difficult to hide. Resolving the conflict in favor of the economy is no solution when individuals, communities, and nature are imperiled to the point that economic growth cannot continue in any case — which is exactly the situation we face. Resolving the conflict entirely in favor of individuals is no solution if this results in a substantial reduction in the integrity of the social bonds the economy knits together: that is, if we are reduced to a random collection of seven billion humans, each scrambling for survival in the absence of functioning currencies and governments. In that case, the result would be universal chaos, confusion, and suffering.

Somehow we have to prepare individually for the ending of growth (a process likely to be accompanied by economic and political upheavals) while at the same time preserving and building social cohesion and laying the groundwork for a new economy that can function in a post-growth, post-fossil fuel environment. It’s a tall order, but nothing less will do.

Setting Priorities

As someone who has for several years been speaking and writing about the consequences of impending energy scarcity, I’m often asked for personal advice. “Where should I live in order to avoid the worst impacts from Peak Oil?” “What career should I prepare myself for?” “What should I invest in?” I’m generally uncomfortable answering such questions. I’m no prophet, merely a trend spotter. The trends I see are broad and deep, but the details of their unfolding could be surprising to everyone, myself certainly included.

Nevertheless, these are legitimate questions, and it is possible to extend some general advice. After long consideration, I’ve decided to put that advice for individual adaptation to the end of growth on a website (
TheEndofGrowth.com
) rather than include it in this book. That way it can be frequently updated as I hear from readers.