Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Vaclav Smil’s latest book explores growth in nature and society. It examines the rules and patterns of growth in four key domains, those of the living world; human energy consumption; human artifacts; and human populations, societies and economies.
Our civilization will eventually fail – through resource exhaustion, overreach, and hubris. The fact that many people counter that claim with the Panglossian insistence that we’ll think of something, that our technology will enable us to go on isolating ourselves from the laws of nature, is just proof of what I’m saying: a lack of exposure to the natural world makes humans stu– well, not as smart as we could be. And I predict that in the near future we will need to get smarter in a hurry.
We’ve begun to experience collapse in all spheres of life. Collapse can be both slow and rapid. It is a series of unending emergencies. Instead of responding or preparing, we’re cheering on a fight between fantasies.Â
There is a fundamental truth that these prophets of cutting-edge technology are not considering: fossil fuels are running out. It was inevitable that they would. Nothing that could only be created under unique conditions over millions of years can be expected to renew itself during the brief span of the Industrial Revolution.
How naive it is to think than the “New Green Deal” will allow us to continue our current lifestyles, just by other greener means. This, my friends in the developed, power and resource hogging countries is impossible.
There are certainly things that can be done to deal with the realities of stagnation and decline; some of them even involve adopting renewable energy technologies, on the one hand, or making sensible preparations for a range of non-apocalyptic but still serious troubles on the other.
It will not help you make friends among politicians if you make an argument about the inevitability of degrowth because politicians and senior civil servants and journalists are almost without exception true believers in the faith of growth.
Despite my ambivalence about the demands of UK Extinction Rebellion I am really impressed by the way it has shot the climate emergency and bio-diversity collapse up the political agenda and into the public imagination.
Unfortunately there appears to be little recognition that such a Green New Deal must address a much bigger set of issues than merely climate change.
A conversation between Emanuele Di Francesco and Tim Jackson, discussing post-growth concepts of a circular economy, the limits of labour productivity and the dynamics of inequality.
In my view, the most glaring omission in the GND is its lack of any challenge to consumerism and our current obsession with economic growth.
It is time for us baby boomers to honestly acknowledge what we did and didn’t do with the gifts given to us by our forebears and be clear about our legacy with which we have saddled the next and succeeding generations.
