BY SOFO ARCHON
Illustration by Steve Cutts
We often hear politicians and economists talk about the importance of economic growth. But as you’ll soon find out, while economic growth is essential for keeping our economy moving, it is also extremely harmful to the planet.
The Need for Economic Growth
So, why is economic growth considered such a good thing, and why do we need it in our economy? To answer these questions, we first need to understand how our economic system—market capitalism—functions.
At its core, market capitalism can be understood as an interaction among owners, laborers, and consumers. Consumers demand certain products and services, which owners produce by employing laborers (who work in exchange for a wage) and then supply them to consumers (in exchange for a fee).
Therefore, it is “demand” that keeps the cycle of buying and selling alive. When demand falls significantly, it can lead to “depression”—a prolonged recession characterized by sharp declines in income and employment. Put simply, the more money people are spend, the better it is for the economy, since spending generates jobs and raises incomes. This is why maintaining the economy in a constant state of growth is considered so crucial.
To keep money in circulation, many tactics are used. One is monetary regulation, such as increasing liquidity through interest rate adjustments. Another is planned obsolescence—the intentional production of low-quality goods that break quickly, thereby ensuring repeat purchases. Advertising is yet another tactic, exploiting people’s insecurities to persuade them to consume more. Finally, politicians sometimes urge the masses to keep shopping when consumption slows down, as former U.S. President George W. Bush did shortly after the September 11 attacks.
Illustration by Steve Cutts
If money stops circulating, our consumption-based economic system is bound to collapse. That’s why people are expected to consume endlessly, regardless of what is being bought or sold—or at what social or environmental cost.
The Environmental Impacts of
Economic Growth
More economic growth means more consumption—and, consequently, more resource extraction and waste production. The result? Resource depletion, pollution, climate change, and biodiversity loss—to name just a few of its impacts, which are often dismissed as mere “externalities” of our economy. In fact, our obsession with economic growth has pushed all life-support systems into dramatic decline.
But who cares about the planet anyway? In our growth-driven economy, only profit matters. The billions of dollars in profit generated by Monsanto are “great” for the economy, even though the company uses herbicides that damage the soil and contaminate water. The same can be said for Dow Chemical, a company responsible for one of the world’s worst industrial disasters, leaving around half a million people suffering from diseases such as cancer, blindness, and birth defects. Or take Coca-Cola, whose excessive water use in India has drained critical aquifers, devastating the lives of farmers and their families.
Illustration by Steve Cutts
Currently, numerous cities across the globe are running out of drinking water. Climate-driven sea levels are rising higher and higher. Our planet is in the midst of its sixth mass extinction of plants and animals. Deforestation is clearing forests on a massive scale, causing habitat loss for millions of species, extreme temperature swings, and other serious damages to ecosystems. Plastic waste continues to flood the oceans, poisoning aquatic life, with estimates suggesting that by 2050 there could be more plastic than fish in the seas. And things will only get worse as long as we maintain this inherently unsustainable system.
Moving Toward a Sustainable Economy
Our economic system is actually anti-economic if we consider both the definition and the etymological roots of the word economy:
Economy: Careful management of resources (money, materials, etc.) to avoid unnecessary expenditure or waste. Derived from the Greek word οἰκονόμος, which comes from οίκος (“household”) and νέμω (“manage”), essentially meaning “household management.”
Our contrived economy requires constant growth, with no regard for the well-being of the biosphere. Like madmen, we extract ever-increasing amounts of resources from a finite planet while producing tremendous amounts of waste and pollution. So where exactly is the careful management of our household—Earth?
Illustration by Steve Cutts
If we want to stop destroying the planet and help heal the wounds we’ve inflicted on it, we need to create a truly environmentally friendly economy grounded in the sustainability principles of conservation, ephemeralization, access, and localization. Let’s take a closer look at each of these concepts and explore why they are essential for creating an economic model that aligns with the natural world.
Conservation. Conservation is the practice of using and managing natural resources efficiently while preventing harm to shared resources such as air and water. Currently, we are consuming resources faster than Earth can replenish them and in ways that generate massive amounts of toxic waste. For example, we rely heavily on non-renewable and highly polluting fossil fuels, such as crude oil, without considering the severe repercussions for the planet. Unfortunately, our current economic system treats nature merely as a commodity to be converted into profit, rather than valuing it in its own right. A true economy would respect and care for the natural world, taking only what is necessary for human well-being while causing minimal harm.
Ephemeralization. Ephemeralization is a term coined by the architect, designer, and futurist R. Buckminster Fuller and refers to the ability of technological advancement to “do more with less,” meaning to produce larger quantities of higher-quality goods and services while using fewer resources and less effort. Our economy, however, prevents this technological trend from reaching its full potential, since increased efficiency would reduce the number of jobs due to technological unemployment—that is, the loss of jobs caused by advances in technology—and, consequently, decrease the circulation of money. As we saw earlier, money is the lifeblood of market capitalism, and if it stops moving, our economic system will collapse.
Access. Our profit-driven economic system relies on the notions of ownership and property. An access economy, by contrast, focuses on people gaining access to goods and services through sharing. Just as we can access shared libraries today, this idea could extend to social services such as food sharing, home sharing, car sharing, and tool sharing. By creating an access-based system, we could meet our needs while dramatically reducing resource extraction, environmental destruction, pollution, and waste. However, the creation of such “access abundance” is blocked by our consumption-based and growth-driven economic system.
Localization. As opposed to globalization, localization focuses on increasing efficiency and reducing waste by producing goods locally whenever possible. Today’s form of globalization is often wasteful and inefficient—for example, the average food item in the U.S. travels around 1,500 miles from farm to table, unnecessarily consuming labor and resources and contributing to environmental pollution. This happens because in our profit-driven economic model, companies do anything to reduce production costs, such as exploiting cheaper labor in foreign countries, showing once again how market capitalism stands in stark opposition to what a true economy would look like.
The good news is that we possess the technical know-how to create a sustainable economy—that is, one that allows us to enjoy the best Earth has to offer while living harmoniously with it. The question is, how much more destruction and suffering are we willing to cause before we decide to make a change?
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