The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality (47 page)

When looking to the past for clues about how our lower-energy future might look and feel, it’s hard to avoid becoming fixated on images from movies and television programs like
Little House on the Prairie
or
Brother
Cadfael
. Some people find these depictions of a simpler life in bygone days attractive; others bristle at the thought that our descendants might have to do without computers, cell phones, and personal automobiles, busying themselves instead with plows and axes, herbs and chickens. Will the march of history pry our electronic toys from our cold, dead hands? How far back down the trail of complexity and technological sophistication might we have to retreat? Can we surrender cars, highways, and supermarkets, but still keep cultural exchange, tolerance, and diversity, along with our hard-won scientific knowledge, advanced healthcare, and instant access to information?

That last question deserves considerable thought. During the past couple of centuries, energy consumption (and, more recently, debt) increased along with population and nasty environmental impacts. Social, cultural, and human benefits also proliferated. All three trends were closely related, with energy growth being the primary driver. In the decades ahead, available energy will decline. This will probably lead to declining population. It might or might not lead to declining environmental impacts (that depends on how we handle the transition: if we burn every last lump of coal, every last tree, and every last ton of tar sands, all in an effort to keep the lights on and the economy growing, then we might alter the energy decline rate at the cost of laying waste to the planet; on the other hand, if we reduce fossil fuel consumption proactively to protect the climate, we might preserve more of the biosphere at the cost of driving the energy curve down more sharply). But what about social and cultural benefits? Will they inevitably wither along with energy consumption?

This, I believe, will be one of the great questions and challenges of the coming century. As was argued in Chapter 6, if we focus on maximizing social and cultural benefits rather than on increasing GDP, we could actually come out ahead in some respects — enjoying, for example, the sense of security that comes from knowing that the skills one learns today will still be relevant in twenty years, or from knowing that species one sees today will still be around for one’s grandchildren to see as well.

Sometimes questions about what is possible can be answered with an experiment. In this case, the relevant experiment might consist of a community trying to build a sustainable post-hydrocarbon economy while maximizing social and cultural payoffs. Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage is precisely such a research project. Founded about 15 years ago by a small group of recent West Coast college graduates, Dancing Rabbit is an intentional community of about 50 people set amid the hills and prairies of rural northeastern Missouri. The stated goal of its residents is “to live ecologically sustainable and socially rewarding lives, and to share the skills and ideas behind that lifestyle.”
²⁰
Members of the community explore natural building, ecological food systems, and consensus decision-making; they have a vehicle co-op, a co-op healthcare fund, and guest space for visitors. By all accounts, the experiment is going well.

Having lived for years in intentional communities (back when I was younger and had more time on my hands), I know the challenges — and the rewards. It’s not a lifestyle for everyone. It requires effort to start a community or to select and join one, and more effort to hash out all the rules and the conflicts that always come up in community life. Many communities fall by the wayside. Only a tiny fraction of the global population is involved in ecovillages or intentional communities, so we can’t realistically expect this strategy to solve the world’s problems. Nevertheless, thousands of such projects are making a go of it, and yielding useful knowledge and experience in the process.
²¹
The future may not look exactly like Dancing Rabbit, but it’s easy to imagine worse outcomes and perhaps hard to think of much better ones.

Apart from intentional communities, there are thousands of organizations, companies, and individuals devoted to finding a path to sustainability — a way of life that will work not just for us, but for the seventh generation hence. These groups and individuals are active in nearly every city and town. You can usually locate them on the Internet with search words like Transition, permaculture, renewable energy, and appropriate technology.
²²
If there’s anything to be known today about a positive future that may await us, it comes from the real-world efforts of people like these to solve practical problems — not from armchair forecasts based on current market trends.

Perspective

We are living through the fifth great turning in human history.
²³

The first was the harnessing of fire nearly two million years ago. Fire enabled us to stay warm in forbidding environments, cook our food (leading to profound changes not only in human culture but human physiology as well), and alter landscapes in our favor.
²⁴

The second was the development of language — likely a gradual process that began many tens of millennia ago, but an equally fateful one: it enabled humans to coordinate their actions over time and space, and it slowly altered the internal architecture of our brains. With language we told stories, and with those stories we wove religions, philosophies, and eventually scientific theories and computer programs.

The third turning point was the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago. Seasonal surpluses of storable food enabled full-time division of labor (society became segmented into peasants, soldiers, accountants, merchants, and kings) as well as the emergence of cities and empires — which brought with them writing, mathematics, and money.

The industrial revolution, only about two centuries old, liberated the energies of fossil fuels, which replaced muscle power in production and transportation, thereby dramatically increasing the speed and scale of those processes. Fossil-fueled economic growth enabled human population to expand seven-fold and led to an explosion of scientific research, practical innovation, and trade. So much economic activity was now possible that a phenomenal expansion of credit was needed to connect potential producers with potential consumers.

Now we are participating in the turning from fossil fueled, debt- and growth-based industrial civilization toward a sustainable, renewable, steady-state society. While previous turnings entailed overall expansion (punctuated by periodic crises, wars, and collapses), this one will be characterized by an overall contraction of society until we are living within Earth’s replenishable budget of renewable resources, while continually recycling most of the minerals and metals that we continue to use. No one who is alive today will be around to see the culmination of this fifth turning, and there is no way to know exactly what the end result will look like. The remainder of the current century will be a time of continual evolution and adaptation as we head, in fits and starts, toward that distant goal — which will itself be a dynamic rather than a static condition, in that human beings will still be evolving and society will still need to adapt continually to its changing environment.

There is no guarantee that the participants in this evolutionary and revolutionary transformation will view it as an extension of human progress, rather than as the ending of civilization as we have known it. Unless we completely fail to rise to the occasion, in which case the human project will simply cease, there will probably be elements of both collapse and renewal.

History suggests that it’s hard to understand and deliberately navigate one of these great turnings as it is happening. Adam Smith lived through the early Industrial Revolution and laid the basis for the economic ideology that would shape the remainder of the industrial period. Yet there is no evidence in his writings that he understood the implications of the coal-based economy that was emerging around him. The thought that fossil fuels would utterly transform the world during the next two centuries evidently never entered his head. We can only speculate about his reaction if he could somehow be revived to witness today’s massive global trade via fuel-powered ships, planes, trains, and trucks, or participate in a computer-mediated stock trade enabled by coal-fired electrons. When Smith imagined the economy of the future, he foresaw one comprised of shopkeepers, artisans, small factories, and trade via sailing ships, because those were his customary terms of reference.

We’re at a similar juncture today. Before us lies a future that will necessarily be very different from the one that our political leaders encourage us to envision. The only mental tools we have with which to imagine the possibilities that await us are ones honed in the past era of growth, extraction, and combustion. As a result, we can’t hope to have a very clear picture of what life will or even could be like for grandchildren of the children now being born.

What we
can
hope to do is to make sure they have a future — that they will have even the possibility of existing and making their own contributions to our species’ unfolding story. In order for future generations to enjoy the barest of chances at life we must avoid the monetary-financial wall in our path, or ensure that the impact is minimal. And we must set a course toward sustainability and away from collision with Earth’s environmental limits. All of this will require us to question what we think we know, to leave our comfort zones far behind, and to engage in hard, challenging work.

We will be tempted to waste time fussing over aspects of our current way of life that may not be salvageable (including many of the goods we associate with economic growth). We will be tempted also to waste time apportioning blame for the failure of our existing economic and industrial systems, and venting anger over the greed and stupidity that stand in the way of building a new economy. None of this will help. The only efforts that will aid in the long run are those that contribute, in some tangible way, to the realization of a pattern of human settlement that is culturally and psychologically rewarding, and that supports rather than undermines the integrity of Earth’s living skin, our only home.

Notes

Introduction

1. Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, Dennis Meadows, and William Behrens III, Limits to Growth. (New York, Signet, 1972)

2. Ugo Bardi, “Cassandra’s Curse: How ‘The Limits to Growth’ Was Demonized,” The Oil Drum, posted March 9, 2008,
europe.theoildrum.com/node/3551
.

3. Graham Turner, “A Comparison of the Limits to Growth with Thirty Years of Reality,” CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, June 2008.

4. Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows, Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2004); Sam Foucher, “Ecological Footprint, Energy Consumption, and the Looming Collapse,” posted May 16, 2007,
theoildrum.com/node/2534
.

5. According to the Federal Reserve, total commercial debt in the US is about $36 trillion. If the average interest on this debt is 3 percent, probably a very low estimate, then we owe in interest about $1 trillion per year. That’s over 6 percent of GNP. If GNP grows at 3 percent, then recipients of interest get all new income plus 3 percent of the old income, until eventually they end up with everything. It takes a lot of growth just to enable repayment of interest.

6. Growth had actually begun in Britain around 1500 as a result of colonialism (an early form of globalization), intensification of agriculture, division of labor, and the adoption of more wind and water power. However, it proceeded at a comparatively slow pace until the adoption of coal-fired machinery in the late 18th century. During the 20th century, global growth averaged about 3 percent per annum. See Stephen Broadberry et al., “British Economic Growth, 1270–1870,” University of Warwick, UK, published online December 6, 2010.

7. “GDP United States (Recent History),”
Data360.org
,
data360.org/dsg.aspx?Data_Set_Group_Id=353&page=3&count=100
.

8. “‘Great Recession’ Over, Research Group Says,”
msnbc.msn.com
, posted September 20, 2010.

9. Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff, “The Aftermath of Financial Crises,” (presented at the meeting of the American Economic Association, San Francisco, CA, January 3, 2009).

10. In philosophy this is called the problem of induction. One cannot infer that a series of events will happen in the future just as they have in past. For example, if all the swans I’ve ever seen are white, I may conclude that all swans are white. However, consistently seeing white swans does not prove that all swans are white; it only adds to a series of observations. The inductive conclusion that all swans are white is proven wrong with the discovery of even one black swan. Nassem Talib’s book Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable explores this topic in-depth (New York: Random House, 2007).

11. In inflation-adjusted dollars. The amount of energy, in British Thermal Units, required to produce a dollar of GDP dropped from close to 20,000 Btu per dollar in 1949 to 8,500 Btu in 2008. Source: US Department of Energy.

12. Praveen Ganta, “US Economic Energy Efficiency: 1950–2008,” Seeking Alpha, posted January 10,2010.