“Mother Nature doesn’t do bailouts.” -Glenn Prickett, senior vice president at Conservation International.
Thomas Friedman began a recent New York Times column by quoting from a brilliantly insightful fake 2005 story from the Onion. The article cited an employee of “Fenghua Ningbo Plastic Works Ltd.,” expressing his disbelief over the “sheer amount of [garbage] Americans will buy” and the “contemptible” fact that when we no longer want an item we “simply throw it away.”
Friedman, in top form, then launches into a description of what’s missing from almost every analysis of the current economic meltdown: “What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: ‘No more.'”
There is no returning to normal. Herman Daly, the brilliant and dominant thinker in the field of ecological economics, foretold of this day over thirty years ago.
To paraphrase Daly, the planet works in a steady state — it does not create additional resources that it doesn’t need. The inflow of energy to the Earth is equal to the outflow. The most important change in recent times is the enormous growth of one of the Earth’s subsystems, the economy. Relative to the total system, which Daly calls the “ecosphere,” the economy-as-subsystem occupies a larger and larger place. This creates a huge shift from an “empty” to a “full” world.
An “empty world” was the world in a state before the industrial revolution, when our consumption of natural resources and generation of pollution and waste was negligible relative to the entire ecosystem. A “full world” is the world we live in today, where our economy and population growth has diminished fish stocks, fresh water, forest cover, biodiversity, and mineral and petroleum reserves.
The closer the economy-as-subsystem comes to becoming an entire system, the more it will have to conform to the physical behavior of the planet’s natural systems. That behavior mode is a steady state — a system that permits qualitative development but not aggregate, quantitative growth. Growth is more of the same stuff; development (as Daly defines it) is the same amount of better stuff (or at least different stuff). The natural world cannot provide the resources and consume the waste to sustain the oversized economy — much less a Godzilla-sized economy that’s still growing (in terms of resource consumption).
What is required is nothing less than a new economy, one that limits growth to the efficient use of natural resources at a rate that generates no net-depletion. An economy where we measure growth as the positives (like education and the manufacturing of new products)and less the negatives (illness, oil spills, and the depletion of natural resources). An economy that allows no externalized costs, so that organic food benefits from its efficient use of resources and traditional food carries the cost of the water pollution and ill health that results from pesticide use. As Friedman so aptly puts it, “we can’t do this anymore.”