Grow the Economy, Shrink the Ecosystem

Yet conflict between economics and ecology is not exactly inevitable

LET’S HOPE that people will soon understand that more economic growth means more carbon emissions and more ecological damage. It’s becoming clearer by the day that renewable energy development, which could have been phased in long ago with home-based solutions, will now be neither timely nor environmentally friendly. (Recall Jimmy Carter’s attempt to set a green trend by placing solar panels on the White House in 1979.)

First, there are inherent political obstacles to government spending that would be required to produce and deliver vast amounts of renewable energy. Second, there is growing public opposition to industrial scale renewable energy because of its local environmental and cultural impacts. Third, renewables, apart from being less than renewable, struggle to compete with fossil fuels for a host of reasons.

We can no longer ignore the troubled relationship between economics and ecology. (A linguist might find this a bit odd given that the words have shared roots, both derived from the Greek word oikos (οἶκος) meaning “house.”) While many conservationists understand the tight connection between growth of the human enterprise and severe ecological impacts, that awareness is virtually absent from economic news, analysis, and everyday chatter. It’s as if there were two entirely different planets, one run by ecology, the other by economics.

So, I anticipated to hear nothing about the environmental downside of economic growth while listening to this commentary about our current financial woes. The Hill hosts, Ryan Grim and Kim Iversen, pondered why the U.S. is being hurt by inflation — by higher prices for food, gasoline, and the like — and how the Federal Reserve plans to raise interest rates to control it despite risking an economic slowdown, just as Americans find themselves deeper in debt and with less money to spend.

Ryan and Kim went through a litany of things like political ramifications, a potential drop in clean energy investments, foreign market manipulations, and possible further government subsidies for manufacturing, transportation, and the job market in an attempt to counterbalance the impact of inflation. I thought to myself, yep, here’s yet another example of the media’s inability to draw the connection between economic growth and environmental consequences.

But wait! What’s this? At the very end of their conversation, Ryan Grim drops a bombshell as talk shifts to how Americans may be choosing and adjusting to less consumption:

“There’s a climate argument because the less people at work, the less people are contributing to climate collapse…maybe the entire push toward working as much as we possibly can ‘till we die isn’t worth it if things are going to get worse every generation.”

Gleefully, Kim responds: “I’m here for it, I really like the Italian and French way of life. Sign me up!”

It is time for world leaders, with French wine in hand or whatever, to stop wishful thinking about decoupling economic growth from environmental damage. It is time they back into the future by promoting a steady state world. At this point in human history, it is the only sane way forward.

As for practicality, leaders can take a few clues from J.B. Mackinnon’s insightful book, The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves. Scaling down may not be as painful as they might pretend.