Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
So how can we define a Liberal? I would start with John Stewart Mill’s definition in On Liberty. Accordingly, a Liberal is someone who believes the following: people are and should be free to do whatever they like up to the point at which it keeps others from doing as they like.
It is likely that the coming oil crunch and global financial contraction will aid our cause and encourage more people to see the sense in localism and de-growth – but, until then, activists must doggedly go on raising awareness wherever they can. Even if it does not feel like it, every conversation counts!
I agree that there are many ways of staving off the dark fairy tale of an impending Malthusian crisis, of which labour intensification is a key one usefully highlighted by Boserup. But that scarcely refutes the basic Malthusian problems I discussed in my last post of resource pressures creating generalised stress which may be ‘referred’ elsewhere – onto other people, or onto other organisms.
Let us openly and loudly declare our commitment to our own eventual material poverty, and in this declaration find moral and spiritual wealth. Let us begin to proclaim the unthinkable and think it every day.
So those who claim that Malthusian limits don’t apply to humans are effectively assigning our species the status of permanent evolutionary winners.
Growth of production is central to the core ideology of the current economic system, to the idea of “development” and “progress”. It is central to the legitimacy of the people who run the global economy. Without it there is a legitimacy crisis.
As we attempt to understand newer and more numerous options (e.g., electric cars, renewables, information) regarding energy system evolution, it is paramount to have internally consistent macro-scale models that take a systems approach that tracks flows and interdependencies among debt, employment, profits, wages, and biophysical quantities (e.g., natural resources and population).
As the Trump administration and Republicans in power in Congress set to work destroying environmental regulations, scientists have added urgency to the resistance with a simple new equation that shows the staggering effect human activity has had on the climate. Their findings? Humans have altered the climate 170 times faster than natural forces.
True, economic growth does provide some short-term benefits and gains, and recessions are legitimately painful and destructive. But economic growth is nevertheless the greatest threat to humanity today, and those most devoted to economic growth will, as its consistent performance begins to wane in the future, perhaps be the greatest political threat to ordinary people of the world.
As Christian Arnsperger suggests, to retrieve the idea of circularity requires a second concept, that of sufficiency, of “enough”. Without that, it is at best a way of postponing the inevitable crash, and at worst a way of giving false credibility to the growthist delusion. So the idea of resource cycling loops needs combining with the radical reduction of consumption, long product durability, re-use and repair.
If there is one idea that has gained the status of true hegemony – dominant and unquestioned around the world – it is the idea that we need to perpetually grow our economies, and every part of them, in order to improve the quality of human life.
These rushes are most often presented as episodes in our national myths of free people seeking a better life, packing their whole life, and their future, on their backs and heading towards a beckoning frontier. That’s the story we tell ourselves.
