If you want sustainability--and not just the Walmart Synthetic Substitute TM--you have to create balance, which means NO NET OVERALL GROWTH.
"Primitive" peoples do this by creating a system of feedback loops with the ecology. They do NOT try to maximize population--rather they SEEK stability--at the same time they tread lightly on available, renewable resources by minimizing consumption to what is "needed." Taboos against taking more than what is necessary are heartfelt, religous, and strict. They don't play games with this.
If you try to play games, what happens is clear. It is not a secret. For example, in our own cultural heritage we have the very direct (Greek) myth of Erischthon. To these ancient warnings based on hard experience we can now add the lessons of modern archaeology as plainly exemplified in the history of Easter Island.
Medieval Europe achieved something like balance by letting war and disease clear out the perpetual overgrowth. While an interesting and varied period of history, it hardly counts as an EASY period of history.
You may like some approaches to balance better than others, but without balance--that is, WITH GROWTH--you inevitably, inexorably, overshoot and crash and burn.
We are doing that now. That's what peak oil, global warming, and the neolib/neocon looting out of the world under "globalization" are all about.
We have already entered the zone of collapse. Amelioration may still be possible: The available scenerios for human survival post-collapse very widely in quality. The Fates are kind.
No net growth of what? No net growth of material inputs ... and given that we are already beyond ecological sustainability, there is first a requirement for a reduction in material inputs down to sustainable levels, and then no net growth of material inputs from there.
However, that does not imply not net economic growth. We can increase our capabilities to provide material support for social activities without increasing our material inputs, provided that the increase in our capabilities is the result of pure technological progress, and not the result of extensive growth.
However, as the diary notes, our present economic system is dependent on ongoing, annual growth, and that will not be in the offing if we are relying on pure technological growth alone.
So, yes, the Wal*mart model is doomed, with one of the principle questions we have to face being how many of us it takes down with it. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
seen this way, growth seems a conceit, a hubristic assumption.
an arrogant presuming of eternal windfall.
rather than the happy accident it more probably is!
the bigger the front, the bigger the back... ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
It seems to me that we are heading into an era in which the cost of resources dwarf the cost of labour. This was also the case before the industrial revolution. During the industrial revolution and the following century, the cost of resources became first comparable and then (in the industrialised world) negligible to the cost of labour, hence the 'don't mend' culture.
I expect that we will see a resurgence in recycling and repair as resources become scarce compared to labour.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
When you improve a technology--really improve it: more results from less inputs, with a smaller resource footprint--you get a period of growth that is STRICTLY TEMPORARY. It is transient. It is simply the process of moving from a less abundant, steady state economy, to a more abundant one. Once you have done that, growth stops.
Let us hypothesize you live in a desert. It does not support much life, and life is hard. Imagine you find a new technology, one that allows you to catch and store water from a wadi and then irrigate the land--somehow without creating water-logging or salinity, perhaps due to a drip-irrigation method that sweeps the salinated water downward and then back into the wadi to be removed with the occasional rain.
You plant fruit trees. More and easier life becomes possible. The fruit trees themselves increase humidity, raising rainfall and increasing the available water. You build out with more fruit trees, and all the life that they support, and want themselves, in order to flourish.
Growth, right? But only for a short time. You are changing the local climate to one that is wetter and more favorable, and using the increased water to build a more abundant life, but when you reach the limits (which you will) the build-out stops. It must stop; worse, if you try to keep it going you will overbuild, redesertify, kill your existing fruit trees and return to the barren and meager scrub.
When we revisit the facts of North American ecology--a fair amount was recorded and written down--it becomes clear that the "primitive" people before the European invasion had precisely evolved a high technology of practical ecological management, that maintained high levels of plant and animal life with very little effort. This translated into abundant food and raw materials, which, however, were deliberately utilized sparingly. When the Europeans arrived they immediately began predating to destruction, with forests and game animals (and fish) showing the effects earliest. We are now half way through the process of turning the eastern half of North America back into desert--or more precisely, scrubland.
There is a hint here, and a warning: Life support on this scrub will be low. We will not return to a pre-invasion ecology, at least not for some millenia. First we will fall--far BELOW pre-invasion levels--because the resources have been destroyed and are no longer there. The Fates are kind.
I believe you have, very concisely, gone to the next step: How it happens. A religious delusion of taking without giving back. The Fates are kind.
i used to gaze at the ocean, drawing peace from its vast wildness, feeling secure that here was a force that was so pure and huge we would never fuck it up, now i know better, and worry about that.
what is especially frustrating/enticing about all this, is the feeling that the only way we can experience balance and sustainability is by becoming different people, more pacific, less predatory.
vegetarianism, or at least more than a token move in that direction, really could and does make a difference to this, on both micro and macro levels.
just as important as changing our light bulbs, imo.
perhaps religion (not spirituality!) has contributed to this turn of events by encouraging fatalism and abnegation of responsibility, handing over our power to self-proclaimed 'experts'.
if we make it through this coming bottleneck as a species, i think it will entail rethinking who we are right down to the core, and thre letting go of much we have become attached to, and worse, felt entitled to.
it might be the biggest fall we have ever taken, but it will be far from the first, and some will carry forward some of the essence of what we suffered and learned the hard way, into a future we can only wonder about.
in other words, those it doesn't kill will be made of much stronger stuff, and when and if the dust settles, our memories will become very important.
so i'm trying to take a good, long, hard look at what's around me and trying to engrave it as deeply as i can....
very grateful for your voice here, though sometimes it's not what i thought i wanted to read!
there's something crystalline about how you put things. ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
Of course, when a group of cells in our body starts claiming an entitlement to grow, irrespective of the ultimate consequences, we call that "cancer".
Pure technological growth is the legacy of the invention and innovation we have inherited from previous generations. After all, most invention is a novel recombination of already existing material, techniques, etc. ... sometimes with a little bit of new discovery added, sometimes just the novel recombination of what already existed ... but the pace of invention accelerates, and has been accelerating over the past 20,000 years at least, because the more each generation inherits, the more new combinations each generation can contribute to the legacy.
And that is the primary reversion of social philosophy that is required ... both with respect to technology and even more critically with respect to the ecological systems that we depend upon for life support ... that we are at most custodians, receiving a legacy for prior generations, and responsible for handing that legacy on, augmented rather than degraded, to the generations to follow.
This is, of course, a social philosophy that many indigenous peoples incorporate into their societies, since of course there are a long chain of previous overshoots and collapses in our time on this planet, and many opportunities to learn these particular lessons. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
This is, of course, a social philosophy that many indigenous peoples incorporate into their societies, since of course there are a long chain of previous overshoots and collapses in our time on this planet, and many opportunities to learn these particular lessons.
That and the fact that those who failed to learn the lesson are no longer with us today. That last point is, perhaps, an even stronger lesson in the importance of not defecating in your own nest.
