The world is faced with a grave
predicament, yet one rarely spoken
of. The United Nations (UN), almost
all governments, business, media and
both the political ‘left’ and ‘right’ are busy
extolling endless growth. Yet we live on a finite
planet, so clearly endless economic growth
is impossible, and its pursuit unsustainable
and unethical – indeed, such destructive
pursuit of the impossible is insane. There
are three main drivers of ‘unsustainability’
– overpopulation, overconsumption and
the growth economy (Washington, 2015).
We feel it is time to focus on these. These
points have been made in the past, but for
quite some time the reasons behind the
unsustainability and insanity of endless
growth have not been explored. We feel
society (and academia) need to be regularly
reminded of them.
The question “On a finiteplanet, is it possible
to keep growing economically forever?”
is one hardly ever asked in neoclassical
economics (Daly, 1991; 2014) or in many other
academic disciplines (Washington, 2015).
Even the World Commission on Environment
and Development (1987) report Our Common
Future did not ask that question – suggesting
that ‘sustainable development’ required a
gross domestic product growth rate of 5%
(a rate at which the global economy would
double its output every 14 years).
More recently, the UN Environment
Programme (2011: 2) has promoted the idea
of the ‘green economy’, which it describes as
“a new engine of growth” (our emphasis). The
UN Sustainable Development Goals (available
at http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/)
also fail to acknowledge that endless growth
is impossible and its pursuit fundamentally
unsustainable (Kopnina, 2016b).
Ecological Limits
This obsession with endless economic
growth demonstrates that societies
still do not understand that humanity
has exceeded ecological limits, and
that this is the root cause of the current
environmental crisis. The book Limits
to Growth (Meadows et al., 1972) showed
that human population growth and the
concomitant increase in the consumption
of resources would exceed planetary limits
around the middle of the 21st century,
causing societal collapse. Upon its release,
this report was strongly criticized by
traditional economists, who labelled the
authors ‘prophets of doom’ (Solow, 1973).
However, a recent 40-year review of Limits
to Growth has shown that its models are
remarkably accurate (Turner, 2014). To
summarize key environmental indicators
of ecological overshoot:
The Global Ecological Footprint now stands at 1.6 Earths (Global Footprint Network, 2017).
The Living Planet Index has declined by 58% between 1970 and 2012 (WWF, 2016).
The species extinction rate is at least 1000 times normal (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005).
At least 60% of ecosystem services are degrading or being used unsustainably (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment,
2005).
Four of nine planetary boundaries have now been exceeded as a result of human activity (Steffen et al., 2015).
In effect, we are bankrupting nature and
consuming the past, present and future of
our biosphere (Wijkman and Rockström,
2012). On a finite world with expanding
human population and consumption,
clearly something has got to give.
Humanity faces a fundamental problem,
for it is totally dependent on the biosphere
it is degrading (Washington, 2013). Hence
society needs to understand and accept
that we are way past sustainable ecological
limits.
The Endless Growth Mantra
Environmental science may tell us that the
consumer society is on a self-destructive
path, but many of us successfully deflect
the evidence by repeating in unison
the mantra of perpetual growth (Rees,
2008). Yet endless repetition does not
make something true. Daly (1991: 183)
pointed out that economic growth is
unrealistically held to be “the cure for
poverty, unemployment, debt repayment,
inflation, balance of payment deficits, the
population explosion, crime, divorce and
drug addiction.” This has not changed
much in the 25 years since Daly wrote those
words, and economic growth is still widely
seen as the panacea for almost all societal
ills. Sometimes commitment to growth
may be promoted in the guise of ‘free
trade’, ‘competitiveness’, ‘productivity’
– or even as ‘sustainable development’
(Victor, 2008). Indeed, from its coining in
Our Common Future to now, ‘sustainable
development’ has had its meaning largely
coopted to mean ‘sustainable growth’ – a
phrase which, we suggest, is an oxymoron
(Washington, 2015). World leaders seek
growth above all else. Neoclassical
economics claimed that the benefits of
growth would ‘trickle down’ and alleviate
global poverty, but this has failed (Kopnina
and Blewitt, 2015). As Daly (1991) notes,
the verb ‘to grow’ has become twisted;
we have forgotten its original meaning: to
spring up and ‘develop to maturity’. That
is, in nature, growth gives way to maturity,
a steady state. To grow beyond a certain
point can be disastrous.
“We are bankrupting nature and consuming the past, present and future of our biosphere.”
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A final aspect of growthism is that it is
commonly claimed that “economic growth
is necessary if we are to have jobs.” Is this
claim correct? There are good grounds to
question whether jobs have historically
been linked to growth. Victor (2008) notes
that the idea only developed 60 years ago,
and for most of human history we managed
to provide employment without economic
growth. Does growth necessarily bring
employment in any case? For example,
there were more Canadians with incomes
less than the ‘low Income cut-off’ in 2005
than in 1980, despite real Canadian gross
domestic product having nearly doubled
over that period (Victor, 2008). As Victor
(2008) notes, it is possible to develop
scenarios where full employment prevails,
poverty is eliminated, people have
more leisure, and greenhouse gases are
drastically reduced, in the context of low
– and ultimately no – economic growth. It
is thus mistaken to assume that economic
growth is a necessity for full employment.
Indeed, once we have exceeded ecological
limits, growth will make us worse off. We
have then reached uneconomic growth
(Daly, 2014). However, unless there are
changes in social outlook, our experience
of diminished well-being will be blamed
on ‘product scarcity’. The orthodox
economic and policy response will then be
to advocate increased growth to remedy
this. In the real world of ecological limits,
this will make us even less well off, but
this will in turn lead to advocacy of ‘even
more growth’ (Daly, 1991). This becomes
a death spiral. Healing our world requires
accepting the reality that the economy
cannot grow forever. However, in recent
years the concept of decoupling has been
put forward to argue that it is possible to
have continued economic growth without
producing further environmental damage.
Decoupling
‘Decoupling’ refers to the idea that an
economy can continue to increase its output
of goods and services, without thereby
increasing pressure on the environment
– for example, by shifting to renewable
energy sources, and using efficiencies to
reduce the amount of resources and energy
consumed. Reducing the use of energy
and materials by society is certainly
needed, and some claim we can move to
a ‘Factor 5’ strategy and only use 20% of
the energy and materials we currently use
(von Wiezsäcker et al., 2009), whilst still
retaining our current quality of life. The
problem with this approach is that the very
concept of decoupling suggests we can
keep on growing forever. As noted above,
the UN advocates the ‘green economy’ yet
also sees this economy as “a new engine
of growth” (United Nations Environment
Programme, 2011: 2); this combination of
‘green’ and ‘growth’ is only made plausible
by invoking the idea that it is possible to
completely decouple economic growth
from environmental impacts.
“Attempts at decoupling slow down the rate at which things get worse, but do not turn them around.”
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How successful have we been in
decoupling? Some modest decoupling of
material flows occurred from the mid1970s
to mid-1990s, but total material
throughput in the global economy still
increased. Victor and Jackson (2015)
note that while there has been some
‘relative decoupling’, any serious absolute
decoupling is not evident. At best, as Victor
(2008) notes, attempts at decoupling slow
down the rate at which things get worse,
but do not turn them around. Hence, talk
of ‘100% decoupling’ is likely to be merely
wishful thinking that allows business-as-
usual growth to continue. Indeed, focusing
our attention on the idea of decoupling
runs the risk of becoming part of the denial
of the unsustainability of endless growth.
Denial
How is it possible for civilizations to
be blind towards the grave and rapidly
approaching threats to their survival,
even when the evidence for those threats
is extensive (Brown, 2008)? Humanity
has a key failing – we tend to deny our
problems. Humanity denies some things
because they force us to ‘confront change’,
others because they are just too painful, or
make us afraid. This human incapacity to
hear bad news makes it hard to solve the
environmental crisis. Of course, another
source of this denial is ideological, where
the reality of the environmental crisis
is denied owing to neoliberal hatred of
any regulations that could restrict the
activities of business (Oreskes and Conway,
2010). The result of such denial is that, as
a society, we continue to act as if there is
no environmental crisis, no matter what
the science says (Washington, 2017a).
Perhaps the key form that denial takes in
the public realm is simply silence – thus
the silence about the environmental crisis;
the silence about the fact that the world
is overpopulated; the deafening silence
about the impossibility of endless growth
(Washington, 2015).
In the past, denial of ecological limits
was common in neoclassical economists.
However, such denial of reality is not just a
thing of the past. An Ecomodernist Manifesto
(available at http://www.ecomodernism.org/)
was written in 2015 by eighteen professionals,
ten of whom are academics. The manifesto
claims:
Despite frequent assertions starting in the
1970s of fundamental “limits to growth”,
there is still remarkably little evidence that
human population and economic expansion
will outstrip the capacity to grow food or
procure critical material resources in the
foreseeable future […] To the degree to
which there are fixed physical boundaries
to human consumption, they are so
theoretical as to be functionally irrelevant.
Such a dismissal of ecological limits (and
the rapidly worsening environmental crisis)
indicates many in academia are still in
denial of the insanity and unsustainability
of endless economic growth.
Anthropocentrism versus Ecocentrism
Many things change (and solutions become
easier) if we change our worldview and
ethics. As Donella Meadows (1997: 84) notes:
People who manage to intervene in systems
at the level of a paradigm hit a leverage
point that totally transforms systems
[…] In a single individual it can happen in
a millisecond. All it takes is a click in the
mind, a new way of seeing.
It has only been possible for our societies
to maintain a belief in the desirability of
pursuing endless growth, because of the
dominant anthropocentric worldview of
modernism (Curry, 2011), which sees the
world as no more than a resource for human
use (Crist, 2012). To put this another way,
the obsession with endless growth has
been the offspring of the anthropocentric
‘human chauvinism’ and ‘speciesism’ that
has dominated Western society for at least
the last 200 years.
“It has only been possible for our societies to maintain a belief in the desirability of pursuing endless growth, because of the dominant anthropocentric worldview of modernism.”
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In contrast, an ecocentric worldview finds
intrinsic value in nature (Washington et al.,
2017). It holds, as Daly (1991: 248) notes, that
“there is something fundamentally wrong
in treating the Earth as if it were a business
in liquidation.” Society thus needs to return
to ecocentrism and adopt an Earth ethic
(Rolston, 2012) and undertake the ‘Great
Work’ of repairing the Earth (Berry, 1999) to
enter the ‘Ecozoic’ (Swimme and Berry, 1992).
Changing to a worldview of ecocentrism is
thus the key step on the path to a sustainable
future (Washington et al., 2017).
Solutions
A major problem with tackling the
environmental crisis is the distraction
caused by partial solutions. For example,
we acknowledge the need for the
maximum possible ‘decoupling’ as part
of a circular or green economy, one that
massively reduces society’s use of energy
and materials (Kopnina and Blewitt,
2015). However, such savings should not
be seen as ‘a new engine of growth’, nor
will such savings be long-term solutions
if we fail to address overpopulation and
overconsumption. The plain truth is that
partial solutions are only of value if they
are part of a comprehensive move to
abandon endless economic growth. We
suggest the following solution frameworks
(Washington, 2015):
accept ecological reality and roll back
denial;
adopt an ecocentric worldview (inspired
by a sense of wonder at life), where we
abandon the false anthropocentric
dream of ‘mastery of nature’.
These are the overarching changes in our
mindset that we must make. Within them
are the practical strategies, including:
controlling population growth through
education, family planning and non-
coercive, humane strategies (Engelman, 2016);
rolling back the deliberately constructed
consumer ethic (Assadourian, 2013) and
concurrently adopting a ‘cradle to cradle’
approach (Kopnina and Blewitt, 2015);
moving past growthism to a steady-state
economy (Daly, 2014);
solving climate change urgently, focusing
on mitigation;
adopting of ‘appropriate’ technology,
especially 100% renewables within two
to three decades, concurrently with
major drives for energy efficiency and conservation;
reducing poverty and inequality, while
simultaneously supporting the Nature
Needs Half vision (Kopnina, 2016a);
educating effectively for sustainability
based on ecological reality and ecocentrism;
creating the political will for change.
Change is urgently needed, and is certainly
feasible. The key to this is breaking the silence
of denial, by talking about the problems.
This may sound wishy-washy, but in fact
meaningful dialogue on the impossibility of
endless growth is an essential step. Academia
can (and should) lead the way on this.
Solving the key cause of the problem – the
idea we can have endless economic growth
on a finite planet –
means tackling the three
key drivers of unsustainability (Washington,
2015): overpopulation, overconsumption and
growth-focused economic policy.
“The steady-state economy deals with all three key drivers of ecological unsustainability, plus a key driver of social
unsustainability: inequality of income.”
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However, this also means tackling some
of the biggest taboos in society. First,
many in society still consider discussion
of limiting the human population a
taboo, but we cannot afford to have this
remain an ‘undiscussable’. Secondly,
Western society (globalized around the
world) is a ‘consumer culture’ that has
been deliberately constructed since 1950;
and what was deliberately constructed
can also be deconstructed (Assadourian,
2013). Thirdly, the growth economy is
still espoused by the UN and almost all
national governments. However, a rational
(and ethical) solution has been espoused
by ecological economist Herman Daly
since the 1970s: the steady-state economy
(Daly, 1991; Daly, 2014). A steady-state
economy features a sustainable population
size for the carrying capacity of its region,
low resource use and a distribution of
wealth which is fair and equitable on an
intergenerational basis (Daly, 2014).
The transition path to a steady-state
economy will be made up of many small
‘positive steps’ that society can take
(Washington, 2017b). The steady-state
economy deals with all three key drivers
of ecological unsustainability, plus a key
driver of social unsustainability: inequality
of income. The scale of income inequality
as a problem can be understood from the
fact that the wealthiest 10% of the world’s
population now owns approximately
85% of the world’s wealth (Credit Suisse,
2016). The ‘cradle to cradle’ approach (and
the related circular economy) arguably
offer the most hope to cut resource use
(Kopnina and Blewitt, 2015). However, we
feel that ways forward can only be found if
the steady-state economy and the circular
economy (within the former) are adhered
to in strict terms and practice. That means
that they must not be subverted to become
partial solutions used to encourage further
growth.
As remarked above, to enable these
changes, what is needed is a major
paradigm shift from anthropocentric
modernism to ecocentrism (Washington
et al., 2017). We acknowledge that the
scale of our predicament is huge, but
maintain that solutions are possible if we
overcome the denial that currently blocks
them. Now, accepting the reality of our
predicament can be depressing. Hence the
need to discuss statements such as: “It is
too late.” The danger of such statements
is that they tend to become self-fulfilling
prophecies, as they give people an excuse
to go into despair, and do nothing positive
(Washington, 2015). In fact, every action
we take towards a ‘Great Work’ of repairing
the Earth (Berry, 1999) is useful. So it is
never too late. Some actions, indeed, may
fail, but some may help to turn the tide – a
‘great tide’ of rising action (Moore, 2016).
Conclusion
The insanity and unsustainability of
endless economic growth is a critical
reality that society must acknowledge
and discuss. To ignore this is irrational
and self-destructive. Ecological limits
exist and have been exceeded. Yet society
remains locked into the unsustainable
mantra of endless growth that has caused
the environmental crisis. Most government
and business response to this has been to
undertake partial solutions, while at the
same time denying the central cause – our
addiction to endless growth. Our ability
to deny our predicament is aided by the
dominant worldview of anthropocentric
modernism. Hence we face a difficult
predicament, for the global experiment of
endless growth has well and truly failed,
and destructively so.
“The insanity and unsustainability of endless economic growth is a critical reality that society must acknowledge and discuss. To ignore this is irrational and self-destructive.”
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Change is not easy but it is possible, but
only by accepting the nature and scale of
our predicament. If we break the silence
of denial, then everything becomes easier.
The other great game-changer is changing
our worldview from anthropocentrism to
ecocentrism. We can then move to slow (then
stop) growth in population, and minimize
resource use via a steady-state economy.
We can stop global ecocide, improve social
equality and move to a truly sustainable
future. Then, this era could become, not the
egotistical ‘Anthropocene’, but the start of
the sustainable ‘Ecozoic’. That is a worthy
vision for the 21st century, a ‘Great Work’
we can all help bring to reality.
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ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Haydn Washington is an environmental scientist, writer and activist based at the PANGEA Research Centre, UNSW, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
Helen Kopnina is an environmental anthropologist at Leiden University, Leiden, and The Hague University of Applied Science, The Hague, the Netherlands.
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