Mother Pelican
A Journal of Solidarity and Sustainability

Vol. 19, No. 5, May 2023 Luis T. Gutiérrez, Editor

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Conscious Human Agency for Demographic and Economic Degrowth ARTICLES Escape from Overshoot ~ Economics for a Planet in Peril Peter A. Victor Are Humans Part Of, or Apart From, Nature? Eileen Crist The End of Cheap Money, Abundant Energy, and Human Exceptionalism Alex Ates Haywood The Imaginary World of Population Projections & Endless Growth Jane O'Sullivan Even AI Understands Limits to Growth. Why Don't We? Cole Thompson The Caravan School: A Learning Journey José Paixão We Are Living Through a Paradigm Shift in Our Understanding of Human Evolution Jan Ritch-Frel Transcending Materialism: Embracing Consciousness and Interconnectedness for a Sustainable Future Benjamin Casteillo On Beauty and Becoming Just, Part II ~ Cleanliness is Next to Stateliness: Assimilationist Hygiene through Private Property Cara Judea Alhadeff Green-Tinted Glasses ~ The Green Growth Delusion Christopher Ketcham Degrowth in the Age of the Climate Emergency Gareth Dale The Rising Chorus of Renewable Energy Skeptics Andrew Nikiforuk The Fed Cannot Fix Today's Energy Inflation Problem Gail Tverberg Converging Debt Crises Richard Heinberg The Cobalt Gold Rush and the East Palestine Disaster Ellen Brown Why Do We Grow Food? Gunnar Rundgren Another Offering From Our Tech Overlords: A Climate Change Solution Without Sacrifice Kurt Cobb Sailing on Planet Titanic ~ Musings 111 Years After the Great Ship Went Down Patrick Mazza Energy Cannibalism Will Suck Us Dry Jack Santa Barbara New Ways of Seeing the World: Big History and the Great Transition David Christian The Emerging New World Economy Richard D. Wolff The Status of Global Oil Production: 2023 Update Roger Blanchard Why Overpopulation Should Be a Women's Issue Karen Shragg & Madeline Weld Moving Beyond the Same Old Song and Dance on Women's Ordination Mary E. Hunt Escape from Overshoot ~ Economics for a Planet in Peril Peter A. Victor This article was originally published by Resilience, 4 April 2023 REPUBLISHED WITH PERMISSION Click the image to enlarge. LINK TO THE BOOK Excerpted with permission from Escape from Overshoot: Economics for a Planet in Peril, Peter Victor (April 2023, New Society Publishers. Fourteen Propositions for Planning an Escape from Overshoot There is compelling evidence that humanity is living in an era of global overshoot. A reduction in the physical scale of the human enterprise is essen­tial to escape from overshoot. The historical and current causes and consequences of overshoot are extremely unequal within and among countries. Limits on material and energy throughput and land transformation are critical to an escape from overshoot. Contraction and convergence is an appropriate ethical principle for building an escape plan. A planned escape from overshoot requires a common sense of pur­pose such as has been seen in times of war and pandemics. A common sense of purpose should be founded on principles of justice, otherwise the escape plan will be compromised by people and institutions seeking their own self-interest rather than work­ing towards shared objectives. These principles of justice should encompass non-human life as well as human. A common sense of purpose is more likely to emerge from forms of democracy that combine representation and participation, and which are based on the principle of subsidiarity-that social, political, and environmental issues are best dealt with at the most imme­diate level consistent with their resolution. Reductions in population should be welcomed, planned for, and en­couraged through increased measures such as: accessibility to edu­cation especially for girls, increased availability of contraception, provision of a basic income and wealth, and better support for the elderly. Finance should facilitate the escape from overshoot rather than exacerbate it. To this end, money creation by commercial banks should be curtailed. The financialization of nature and the implica­tion that it exists solely to serve human interests, should be halted and reversed. Technology does not exist in isolation. It is embodied in materials and requires energy for its production and use. Technologies often have unintended consequences which can be positive and negative. Whether and how technology contributes to the escape from over­shoot depends on who owns it and what they seek to obtain from that ownership. Knowledge and ideas should be shared as much as possible given that they are non-rival. Exclusion of potential users through intellectual property rights should be discouraged, especially where it impedes the flow of information, products, and services to low-income coun­tries as happened, for example, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Capitalism presents serious obstacles to an escape from overshoot. It serves the interests of the owners of capital, who, through in­creasingly powerful corporations, are constantly looking for ways to extend their reach, increasing overshoot, and only incidentally serving the interests of other members of society. Experience with Socialism has a mixed record in relation to overshoot, having fo­cused on growth almost as much as in capitalism, and it has shown the shortcomings of central planning. Overshoot will transform economic and political systems. It is better to choose the transformations we want rather than have them forced upon us by circumstances beyond our control. READ THE PROLOGUE ABOUT THE AUTHOR Peter A. Victor is Professor Emeritus at York University. He was awarded a PhD in economics from the University of British Columbia in 1971 and has worked for 50 years in Canada and abroad as an academic, consultant, and public servant specializing in ecological economics and alternatives to economic growth. Peter sits on the Honorary Board of the David Suzuki Foundation and the Circle of Ecological Economics Elders, is chair of the Science Advisory Committee of the Footprint Data Foundation, and is an elected member of the Royal Society of Canada. He was the recipient of the Molson Prize in the Social Sciences from the Canada Council for the Arts in 2011 and the Boulding Memorial Prize from the International Society for Ecological Economics in 2014. He is the author of six previous books, including Managing Without Growth. |Back to Outline| LINK TO THE CURRENT ISSUE          LINK TO THE HOME PAGE

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