Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
History has witnessed a shift in the dominant organizing structure of the economy from hunter-gatherer to agrarian to industrial. The exploitative tendencies of people, including exploitation of both nature and other people, have expanded with these shifts to the point that humanity now faces a crisis of overexploitation.
Owing to the limits of eco-efficiency and the need to liberate environmental space for the global poor,, new policy instruments should be designed to bring about ecological fair sharing between countries and a new economy based on the concept of sufficiency.
Many of the severest crises we’re facing at present – e.g. climate instability, biodiversity collapse, the depletion of vital resources, and the dangerous compromise of ecosystem health through the spread of waste plastic and other pollution – stem directly from economic expansion hitting against ’hard’ limits in the physical world.
Poor old Malthus. He has had a bad reputation ever since he predicted, towards the end of the 18th century, that over-population would lead to famine and then to social collapse.
In his article, “The Earth’s Carrying Capacity for Human Life is Not Fixed,” Ted Nordhaus, co-founder of the Breakthrough Institute, a California-based energy and environment think tank, seeks to enlist readers in his optimistic vision of the future. It’s a future in which there are many more people on the planet and each enjoys a high standard of living, while environmental impacts are reduced. It’s a cheery vision. If only it were plausible.
With the political-economic road to an ecological civilization seemingly blocked for now, too many of our allies are following detour signs toward dubious industrial and post-industrial fixes. The mother of invention is the quest for new markets, and, as Thorstein Veblen once quipped, it’s invention that’s the mother of necessity.
An enclosure is no less than right to amorality, freed from the ancient obligations of the common. It follows that our task is to evacuate enclosures and reclaim the common.
Copiously, ludicrously, we deface our lands, displace our brother hawks and sister mice, and destroy our links to the ecological communities that fabric our very being. Life is consumption, and, I suppose, consumption is life. But we have strayed so far from whence we came.
Although certainly embraced more frequently and ardently by liberals than by what passes for a conservative today, Wendell Berry is clearly a religious rather than Liberal thinker, praising the unified and relentless in his criticism of the fragmented.
As resources become scarce, A New Reality uses a pattern seen in nature – decelerating growth in the second part of the Sigmoid Curve – to display a shift that must happen in order for human kind to survive, referred to as Epoch B. In Epoch B, people recognize the limited nature of resources and human values adjust toward equilibrium, balance and consensus – interdependence.
This first in our series of briefing papers on building An Economy That Works explores the underlying phenomenon of ‘secular stagnation’ – a long-term decline in the rate of growth of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
The Ancient Romans never understood what hit them. Nor did later historians: there exist literally hundreds of theories on what caused the fall of the Roman Empire.
