In this episode, we explore how the drive for ever-increasing growth in the economy may not be such a good idea…
Yesterday morning a card appeared in my mail-box, from the local water-provider. They were grumpily complaining that they couldn’t find the house’s water-meter, because of ‘garden obstruction’, they said. And they were going to charge me extra if I couldn’t give them the correct figure from the meter.
Okay, sure, on my meagre income, extra charges of that kind are something that I simply cannot afford, so I’d better sort that out straight away. Now, if I remember right, the meter’s just behind the fence, isn’t it? - a few paces to the left of the driveway, perhaps?
But ‘garden obstruction’? What did they mean by that?
Ah. Oh… I, uh, think the meter’s supposed to be somewhere in there? Maybe?
Push, shove, struggle, twang, scratch, ouch ouch ouch - ah, there it is!
Yikes! - where did all that growth come from? About five foot of that stuff that I had to push through to get to here? But it was completely clear a year ago - how did it all grow that fast in just the past few months? How?
Okay, so it’s a La Niña again this year, like the year before. Which means wet - lots of wet. Rain, rain, non-stop rain almost, for month after month. (Yeah, the rain’s pounding on the roof again right now. Again.) And everything here is growing like crazy… Some of the grass is shoulder-high, for heaven’s sake! - I’m having to cut it back just about every week now. And I hadn’t noticed it before, but some of the other shrubs in the garden have completely blocked their pathways - I’ll have to cut all of those back too somehow, just like this one here. Too much growth!
And the mosquitoes? - my gawd, the mosquitoes! Clouds of them… never seen them anything like this before, they’re absolutely everywhere! Never had this many mosquito-bites before, either - ouch ouch itch ouch!
All of which somehow seems an apposite metaphor for our current so-called ‘economics’.
So imagine that there’s a message that’s appeared in some metaphoric mailbox: but instead of a business complaining about nature, this time it’s from nature complaining about the way we do business.
And it’s right: probably the driving motif in current ‘economics’ is the concept of ‘infinite growth’. Agreed that, yeah, that’s sort-of necessary if what you’re actually running is a global-scale Ponzi-scheme - but the reality is that it cannot keep going indefinitely, because you can’t have infinite-growth on a finite planet. (Okay, the money-system can grow to infinity, but what it’s linked to can’t, because it’s most definitely finite - hence why we get inflation and suchlike.) And as a Ponzi-scheme starts to implode and fall apart, there are usually increasingly-desperate attempts to make it seem bigger than it actually is - hence what we see right now as too much growth.
And yes, it is ‘too much growth’ in much the same sense as in my garden, because the whole system needs to be trimmed back and managed and more and more and more if there’s to be any chance to have some kind of sustainability - which, as is already painfully clear, is receding into the distance further and faster every day. What’s feeding it all is the endless rain of imaginary money - and until that’s brought back to a more manageable level, our chances of finding a way to a viable recovery continue to will remain slim at best.
Oh, and the mosquitoes? Look around in our world: ever-increasing clouds of fast-moving parasites swarming around - entrepreneurs all, as literal ‘between-takers’. Sucking away at our resources, perhaps each only small quantities at a time, maybe, but so many of them that the losses add up fast, and the relentless irritations and distractions and minor wounds rise even faster. And too much growth amongst them, too: there are so many of the wretched things that it’s becoming increasingly impossible to keep them at bay. What we need most for them right now is some kind of bug-spray to kill the darn things off - but unfortunately it doesn’t exist.
As we’ve explored in other episodes here, the underlying cause in both cases is possessionism and possession-based economics, and its fundamentally-foolish notion of money as a means to manage access to shared resources. Hence what would solve both of those problems in one sweep is a shift to a responsibility-based economics, within which both possessionism and money become irrelevant, and can quietly fade away into an unmissed memory of an often-misery-filled past.
But as with climate-change, though, the courage that’s needed to make that change still seems mostly absent amongst most of the people of this world - yet if we continue to leave things as they are, we risk being overwhelmed by too much growth in disasters of every kind. Small-changes first might make it easier to reach the big-changes that we actually need - yet most of all, we all need somehow to find that courage and commitment whilst we still have the choice and chance to do so.
As usual great read Tom! I completely agree with your viewpoint that infinite economic growth would bring many side effects (like mosquito bites); that nature cannot tolerate anymore. Thank you.