Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet by Kerryn Higgs Page B
Authors: Kerryn Higgs
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rapid population growth, extensive malnutrition, the depletion of nonrenewable resources, and environmental decline. 2 Their modeling of these trends showed that, if we continued along the same growth trajectory, we would be likely to precipitate ecological and social collapse in the second half of the twenty-first century.
I happened upon Limits in the year it was published. Its logic was persuasive to me from the outset, and I expected its message to have a significant impact on the subsequent conduct of human affairs. But as the years rolled by, it seemed there was little effect—and then, even less. True, scientists continued to voice alarm, while the evidence began to mount that life on earth was experiencing a sixth extinction pulse and that the planet was warming. United Nations conferences proliferated, drawing attention to a plethora of environmental problems at every imaginable scale and attempting various treaties, protocols, and programs to address them. But outside the scientific community, in governments, bureaucracies, and public debate, an intensifying promotion of economic growth rendered it ever more securely entrenched as the natural objective of collective human effort. Growth became the “commonsense” solution to virtually all social problems—including, paradoxically, the environmental degradation it was causing. This quickening intent was not confined to the developed world but was increasingly emulated by almost all types of state, including communist China.
It was this contradiction between the warnings of scientists and the popularity of growth economics, witnessed over the course of my adult life, that triggered the curiosity that led to this book. How could the advice of the scientific establishment, venerated to a fault during my early life, have been so comprehensively ignored and emphatically discarded a decade or two later by governments and policymakers worldwide? What were the decisive influences that neutralized that counsel of caution? How was such a compelling alert from a hitherto trusted source discounted so successfully? How did the opposite view, that growth was the most essential purpose of human societies, become the accepted wisdom? How had economists eclipsed scientists as preeminent authorities and indispensable voices in the policy sphere?
In the second decade of the twenty-first century, economic growth remains the guiding principle for human endeavor, impeded only by the internal busts endemic to the capitalist system itself and the cascades of environmental degradation that are common in growing economies. The ship of growth sails on virtually unchallenged, as if its consequences had nothing at all to do with it. From international bodies such as the International Monetary Fund to most governments and their oppositions throughout the world, growth is more than ever the prize, the goal, the indispensable foundation, mentioned endlessly in speeches, reports, and press releases. As the idea has continued to flourish, its risks have come to seem less serious, despite the mounting evidence of its dysfunctional outcomes—accelerating species destruction, climate destabilization, toxic pollution of rivers and groundwater, and the depletion of many of the key resources on which the economic edifice depends. In Frederick Buell’s words, what was once entertained as a looming apocalypse has been normalized as a “way of life.” 3
The unprecedented economic expansion of the past century and a half coincided with the emergence of modern corporations. These consolidated corporate entities, dependent on a stream of always increasing profits and invested in the continuation of economic growth, were assembled around 1900 in the United States. They went on to band together in various trade lobbies and business organizations designed to influence democratic processes and, later, to propagate an ideology of growth as a universal panacea—even as the solution to the social and
I happened upon Limits in the year it was published. Its logic was persuasive to me from the outset, and I expected its message to have a significant impact on the subsequent conduct of human affairs. But as the years rolled by, it seemed there was little effect—and then, even less. True, scientists continued to voice alarm, while the evidence began to mount that life on earth was experiencing a sixth extinction pulse and that the planet was warming. United Nations conferences proliferated, drawing attention to a plethora of environmental problems at every imaginable scale and attempting various treaties, protocols, and programs to address them. But outside the scientific community, in governments, bureaucracies, and public debate, an intensifying promotion of economic growth rendered it ever more securely entrenched as the natural objective of collective human effort. Growth became the “commonsense” solution to virtually all social problems—including, paradoxically, the environmental degradation it was causing. This quickening intent was not confined to the developed world but was increasingly emulated by almost all types of state, including communist China.
It was this contradiction between the warnings of scientists and the popularity of growth economics, witnessed over the course of my adult life, that triggered the curiosity that led to this book. How could the advice of the scientific establishment, venerated to a fault during my early life, have been so comprehensively ignored and emphatically discarded a decade or two later by governments and policymakers worldwide? What were the decisive influences that neutralized that counsel of caution? How was such a compelling alert from a hitherto trusted source discounted so successfully? How did the opposite view, that growth was the most essential purpose of human societies, become the accepted wisdom? How had economists eclipsed scientists as preeminent authorities and indispensable voices in the policy sphere?
In the second decade of the twenty-first century, economic growth remains the guiding principle for human endeavor, impeded only by the internal busts endemic to the capitalist system itself and the cascades of environmental degradation that are common in growing economies. The ship of growth sails on virtually unchallenged, as if its consequences had nothing at all to do with it. From international bodies such as the International Monetary Fund to most governments and their oppositions throughout the world, growth is more than ever the prize, the goal, the indispensable foundation, mentioned endlessly in speeches, reports, and press releases. As the idea has continued to flourish, its risks have come to seem less serious, despite the mounting evidence of its dysfunctional outcomes—accelerating species destruction, climate destabilization, toxic pollution of rivers and groundwater, and the depletion of many of the key resources on which the economic edifice depends. In Frederick Buell’s words, what was once entertained as a looming apocalypse has been normalized as a “way of life.” 3
The unprecedented economic expansion of the past century and a half coincided with the emergence of modern corporations. These consolidated corporate entities, dependent on a stream of always increasing profits and invested in the continuation of economic growth, were assembled around 1900 in the United States. They went on to band together in various trade lobbies and business organizations designed to influence democratic processes and, later, to propagate an ideology of growth as a universal panacea—even as the solution to the social and
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