“Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”
We’ve known for several decades of the scale of destruction caused by the human economic activity and yet because money is given precedent over everything else it has allowed such destruction to continue unabated. The development of clean and renewable energies has been a fledgling industry for many years because it’s been driven out by cartels and lobbying by bigger and more profitable industries. Within the reigning ideology, only when the monetized loss of biodiversity becomes greater than GDP will there be any significant effort to radically attend to health of the environment. Put frankly, our current environmental measures for achieving sustainability are palpably inconsequential and will remain so whilst corporations outflank every puny law and regulation that seeks to constrain their profitability.
Capitalism requires that economies continually expand financially and the only way it can achieve that is by producing more goods and services or through the enclosure of the commons. Since around 1970, global production levels have flat lined and subsequent capital gains have been the result of privatization, cost-cutting and the virtualisation of the economy as discussed earlier. There’s literally no more financial credit to extend without stealing from and desolating the future. Environmental constraints then are a big part of the “economic crisis”.
“Western civilization is a loaded gun pointed at the head of this planet.
John Maynard Keynes
joked that governments could generate economic growth just by hiring people to dig holes and fill them up and yet this is essentially what’s happening on a much larger scale in China where empty cities are built to maintain impressive GDP growth. It’s obvious then that corporations and governments are incapable of addressing ecological concerns through their current policies. If governments truly cared about the health of ecosystems then the first point of call would be to end the military industrial complex – the biggest polluter on the planet. Ofcourse, in the current paradigm of infinite growth, governments need such astronomical defence budgets to enable the colonization of foreign lands and acquisition of natural resources. War is an unavoidable accompaniment to an economic system that demands growth.
Any sociological theory which ignores the reality of the body will fail. The biosphere is the foundation of life, not simply a resource that can be priced as if with enough money we could afford to do without it. The very act of seeing something as a resource to be exploited abstracts our relationship with that thing which allows it to be commoditised. In order for our society to make the transition towards a sustainable ecology, we must first realize that humans are not separate from the biosphere. We are embedded within a web of relationships which cannot be reduced to mere financial transactions. Life, not money, must be the basis of an ecological economic system. Whilst this is much harder to quantify, it is more likely to produce the decisions we need to secure future prosperity.
A circular economy is the economic realization of the interconnectedness of all beings. On a practical level, this requires eliminating negative externalities and thus internalizing costs through measures like full cost accounting and cradle to cradle production. Many industries today can only operate because their costs are externalized. For example, statutory caps on liability for oil spills and nuclear meltdowns make offshore drilling and nuclear power profitable for their operators, even though the net effect on society is negative. The result of internalizing costs, if other things remain the same, is that profit is dramatically reduced. Ofcourse, this internally contradicts the underlying goals of our current capitalist system.
Ultimately, the movement towards a steady-state economy requires the removal of interest-bearing debt which propels growth imperative. Unfortunately, growth is integral to the underlying structures and mechanisms of a capitalist economy and as such growth cannot be removed leaving the rest of the economic infrastructure as it is. Seemingly, the only options on the table are to either revolt against the system, or gradually subvert its values and transition the social infrastructure or wait until it collapses in on itself. The longer we wait, the messier it gets.
A post-growth economy does not mean that there would be no functional economic system, it simply means that people live within their means and without the need for capital accumulation. Goods and services would still be produced, but such a society wouldn’t depend on growth of private goods to prosper. Businesses would align themselves towards social and environmental needs instead of solely corporate needs.
“It is obvious that the real wealth of life aboard our planet is a forwardly-operative, metabolic, and intellectual regenerating system.”
No other economic system even approaches the efficiency of capitalism in utilizing capital to meet individual material human needs and wants. Yet from an ecological perspective, capitalism is highly entropic and unsustainable, capital cannot grow without consuming its metabolic periphery and breaking the homeostasis of the system. In doing this the capitalist mode of production depletes social capital as well as natural capital with no incentive to replenish future supplies. Once all natural and social capital are exhausted, the capitalist economy is faced with its glaring onesidedness.
“If humanity is to live in balance with nature, we must turn to
ecology for the essential guidelines of how the future society should be organized.”
A sustainable economy must be based on a fundamentally different paradigm, one which is in accordance with living systems which by their very nature are regenerative, synergistic and negentropic. Immature eco-systems are characterized by competition and aggression, while mature eco-systems are symbiotic and cooperative. To learn how best to apply these principles to our economy we should once again reconsider how indigenous peoples have organized their societies. Not to dismiss the role that competition plays in evolutionary selection, naturalists such as Peter Kropotkin have made compelling cases that mutual aid is more important for survival than competition.
