The community of post growth thinkers around the world is abuzz with the prospect of Dick Smith’s Wilberforce Award. Announced a couple of weeks ago, the $1 million dollars will be awarded “to anyone under 30 who can impress Dick by becoming famous through his or her ability to show leadership in communicating an alternative to our population and consumption growth-obsessed economy.”
Check out Dick’s You Tube videos here:
Image sourced from The Age, 5 August 2010
Challenging uneconomic growth is a movement that is gaining momentum around the world.
Along with consumption, the question of population is at the heart of growth and post growth issues. Recently in Australia, this question has begun emerging into mainstream public debate.
With his documentary ‘The Population Puzzle’, Australian entrepreneur and adventurer Dick Smith has done something very brave, and very important, in working to break the taboo on speaking about population.
In addition to his documentary, Smith has launched a web site, Dick Smith’s Population Puzzle, in which he discusses the motivation for and thinking behind his initiative:
“Even though we may be able to grow to 100 million people in Australia – what would be the advantage in doing this? The question is why?…
I have a feeling it’s all “down hill” from now as the population increases. I can’t think of any of our present problems in this world which are alleviated by more people. In fact, quite the opposite. I think unrestrained population growth will make virtually every problem more difficult.”
In Australia, the population issue has often been emotionally charged, because of the role of immigration in Australia’s population growth. The debate is thus easily hijacked from being a discussion about exactly what a sustainable population for Australia would be, and instead becomes mired in blame games and fuels the agenda of racist elements.
One of the first statements by Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard (Australia’s first female PM), who took over the leadership of the country in late June, was to diverge from outgoing Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s policy vision of a ‘Big Australia’, in which Rudd had articulated a vision of a population of 36 million by 2050 (Australia’s population is currently about 22.5 million).
Prime Minister Julia Gillard is breaking free from one of her predecessor’s main policy stances by announcing she is not interested in a “big Australia”.
Former prime minister Kevin Rudd was in favour of population growth, with his government predicting it to hit around 36 million by 2050, largely through immigration…
“I don’t support the idea of a big Australia with arbitrary targets of, say, a 40 million-strong Australia or a 36 million-strong Australia. We need to stop, take a breath and develop policies for a sustainable Australia…”
Mr Rudd installed Tony Burke as the Minister for Population, but in one of her first moves as Prime Minister, Ms Gillard has changed his job description to Minister for Sustainable Population…
Australian businessman Dick Smith has been a vocal advocate for a more sustainable approach to population growth and has applauded Ms Gillard’s announcement.
But he acknowledges it will not be welcomed by everyone.
“The business community, my wealthy mates are completely addicted to growth because of greed,” he said.
“So they’re going to fight her every inch of the way. They just want growth, growth, growth, even though it’s obvious that it’s not sustainable.
Gillard shuts door on ‘Big Australia’, The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 27 June 2010
Dick Smith has used his personal ‘currency’ to help bring this issue into the mainstream of debate, and his initiative is both timely and admirable.
There is one thing I would offer to Dick Smith to strengthen his case, and that is to reframe his question:
‘How many people can Australia support?’
It seems to be the critical question, however seeking an answer to this question will lead only to an endless spiral of further debate, because the answer can only ever be – ‘it depends’.
How do Australians want to live? Because this will determine our demands on nature – how much water and energy we use, how much greenhouse gas and waste we generate, how much and what kind of food do we want to eat? What kind of houses do we want, how will we get around?
It is a hot air question.
It is also not helpful in an era of global economic trade, where our resources are exported to, and imported from, around the globe, and in a world where nations like China and Saudi Arabia are now buying up farmland in foreign nations to shore up their own food supply, in a move dubbed ‘Peak Soil’.
In a global economy, nations cannot focus on domestic populations alone when population and consumption pressures from elsewhere will impact on their citizens.
What is needed is an holistic, global, scientific approach. Luckily, this already exists!
In the early 1990s, Professor William Rees of the University of British Columbia and his then-PhD student Mathis Wackernagel created the Ecological Footprint.
Ecological Footprint accounting compares human demand on nature with the biosphere’s ability to regenerate resources and provide services. It does this by assessing the biologically productive land and marine area required to produce the resources a population consumes and absorb the corresponding waste, using prevailing technology.
This metric inverts the ‘carrying capacity’ question and instead asks ‘how much of the earth’s productive capacity does it take to support Australians at current levels of consumption?’
It’s measurable.
In the mid-2000s, Wackernagel founded the Global Footprint Network (GFN), a non profit based in California, whose objective is to:
Supporting creation of a sustainable economy by advancing the scientific rigour and practical application of the Ecological Footprint as a measurement and policy tool, with the goal of making ecological limits central to decision making.
GFN maintains a series of biophysical accounts for most nations, which track whether they are running an ecological deficit. These are published in the Living Planet Reports.
GFN’s accounts – which use a conservative accounting approach, and are therefore an underestimate – show that humanity as a whole is already in overshoot ie. when demand on nature exceeds available supply.
Each year, GFN calculates Earth Overshoot Day by comparing nature’s supply in the form of biocapacity (the amount of resources the planet regenerates each year) with human demand (Ecological Footprint), the amount it takes to produce all the living resources we consume and absorb our carbon dioxide emissions.
Its data for 2010 reveals that as of August 21, humanity has exhausted all the ecological services – from filtering CO2 to producing the raw materials for food – that nature can provide this year. From now until the end of the year, we will meet our ecological demand by depleting resource stocks and accumulating greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
What would happen if you spent all your annual household’s budget in nine months?
We should all be as worried about this as we are about tracking our financial position – more so, given that financial wealth ultimately depends on the health and productive capacity of the Earth.
GFN are working with a number of national governments on strengthening the data for each nation’s account through their Ten in Ten Program, designed to get 10 countries using the Ecological Footprint as a complement to GDP in decision making within ten years.
National governments can use the Footprint to:
- Assess the value of their country’s ecological assets
- Monitor and manage their assets
- Identify the risks associated with ecological deficits
- Set policy that is informed by ecological reality and makes safeguarding resources a top priority
- Measure progress toward their goals
The Ecological Footprint is a metric which is both based on science and readily communicated to people, and is already widely supported and in use around the world.
If Dick Smith and others concerned with this question want to influence public debate and policy, brokering a partnership between relevant organisations in Australia and the Global Footprint Network would be a key step in resolving the Population Puzzle.
At its core sustainability revolves around renewability. It can only be found in something that is renewable each year. For the human enterprise, sustainability requires us to use only renewable resources and energy, but not just use them, use them within their limits.
The world’s forests, for instance, can regenerate over the course of a year only so much. This amount is what we can harvest in a year. When we harvest more than this magical number, we begin to eat into the natural capital savings account. The more we take out of our savings this year, the less interest it will bear into our account next year – the less that can be renewed for next year’s harvest.
Today is Earth Overshoot Day, the ultimate anti-holiday. It highlights when we, as a species on this planet, have depleted a year’s worth of resources. It is the day we start running on red, consuming more than our fair share, taking out of our natural savings account, and eating away at next year’s supply.
Ecological Footprints Through History
Running On Way Below Empty
As our economy has grown through history we have required more and more resources each year. We started eating away the planet’s able to sustain us on December 19, 1987 – the first Earth Overshoot Day. Since then our economy has been eating away at our future and our children’s future. Today we’re using 150% of the Earth’s capacity.
Since that fateful day in 1987 we’ve been pushing our natural accounts further and further into the red. It’s one thing for us to worry about our nation’s fiscal deficit, but that pales in comparison to our ecological deficit – every year we’re increasing the one deficit that truly matters to human survival. If we continue on this path it is project that we will use an entire planet’s worth of resources for a year in only 6 months by 2050. Of course, that’s assuming we still have a stable enough climate to maintain our consumption and production growth.
Your Ecological Footprint
I’m not a fan of debt. At its core debt is a wager on your potential to make money in the future – a bet that you’ll be doing better down the road and can pay off your excess now. Too often it simply builds up, because as our wages increase so does our excess. But financial prudence can reign in that excess. The problem with ecological debt? You’re wagering against the very future wealth that you’re depleting. It’s the only bank in town and it only has so much money.
If we can’t take out loans from our natural bank and we’re deep in the red, what do we do to get back in the green? (not black, green!) To ensure that humanity has a chance to maintain a stable, progressive, secure and just society on this planet we must recognize the conflicts of economic growth and ecological resilience. Money is worthless if we’ve wiped out all the crops. Increasing GDP doesn’t account for much if everyone is miserable and half the world is a desert.
Learn more about your ecological footprint at the Global Footprint Network.
See my cross-post on Steady State Revolution and out my guest post on Green Growth Cascadia about Earth Overshoot Day. Image Credits: Global Footprint Network.
Growth Has Limits, Says Oregonian
Oregon is an interesting state. It is one of the three states on the pacific coast, equally mixed with both liberal and conservative thought, and full of beautiful landscape. I spent my early years in Oregon, both Northern and Southern. There are some serious, progressive discussions going on in Oregon. A recent article on Oregon Live is probably one of the best I’ve read of the fallacy of growth.
Here’s a bit:
“In the short term, growth supports families, relieves social pressures that produce conflict and crime, pays for amenities such as the arts, offers opportunities for entrepreneurs and makes some of us exceedingly wealthy.
But growth is also an addiction. And, like most addictions, it threatens to destroy us. Not only does it clog our freeways, but it also paves farmland, wipes out open spaces, saddles taxpayers with ruinous development costs and crushes the quality of life that attracted us to our communities in the first place. Growth sucks irreplaceable resources out of the earth. It dumps poisonous pollution into our environment. It crowds out the planet’s other species and utterly fails to deliver the human happiness it promises…
It’s not as if nobody saw this coming. ‘The increase of wealth is not boundless,’ wrote John Stuart Mill in the mid-19th century. ‘The end of growth leads to a stationary state’…
Maybe it’s possible to get growth under control while keeping families fed and communities intact. The goal of steady-state economics is, after all, reasonable incomes for all human beings in a more humane society that preserves the planet and promotes human happiness. That’s a tall order. But we’ve satisfied tall orders before.
We can start on this one by questioning our near-universal assumption that growth is always good. And the next time a candidate promises unending growth, it wouldn’t hurt if somebody in the audience asked, ‘What for?’
After all, as Edward Abbey long ago pointed out, ‘Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.’”
Read the full article here.
In the effort to get alternatives to growth a home in the national agenda, we have to jump at every chance we can get.
Here’s an email I received today from Rob Deitz, the executive director of the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy (CASSE), an organization doing some of the best work developing and promoting the concept of a steady state economy:
There is a real opportunity sitting in front of us. We all want to see the U.S. take a leadership role in recognizing the limits to economic growth and promoting the transition to a steady state economy. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has released a draft of its strategic plan for 2011-2015, and it is open for public review and comment until Friday, July 30th at midnight Eastern time. As of now, there are very few public remarks [see the circled bit to the right -- click to enlarge], so it will be advantageous even at this late date for as many people as possible to comment.
You can download and review the draft here:
http://www.epa.gov/ocfo/plan/2011/draft_strategic_plan_june_16_2010.pdfIt doesn’t mention economic growth at all, and it certainly doesn’t mention the steady state economy. You can submit comments on the Draft Strategic Plan (again, prior to midnight on Friday, July 30th) at:
http://www.regulations.gov/search/Regs/home.html#submitComment?R=0900006480b054e6Once you have made comments on the strategic plan, you can also leave comments on the EPA blog topic “Expanding the Conversation on Environmentalism” by clicking through here:
http://blog.epa.gov/strategicplan/?p=134&preview=true
Please consider adding your comments! This is a low-cost way to slip questions about growth into the view of both policymakers and the public. Every bit counts — and on the web, you never know who might stumble across your links or comments and get engaged.
Rob and CASSE are friends of ours; we thank them for sounding the call about this opportunity. Go here to receive their newsletter, and here to join 5,430 others and sign their position statement on economic growth.
[UPDATE 7/28]
Here’s a comment from Sandwichman, an alert reader who points out that getting the EPA to consider anything other than the party line on economic growth will be a tough sell:
“The draft document does indeed mention economic growth. On page 3, point three of their five point program that ‘will inform the work of every program office in every region and help us meet the challenges we face today’ is:
‘Advancing Science, Research and Technological Innovation: We will seek to be a leader in advancing the scientific research and technological innovation that not only enhance our abilities to protect the environment, but promote new jobs and the sustainable growth of our economy.’”
Nice catch. And he sums it up best: “Sustainable growth. Outrageous.”
In June 2010, I attended ‘The Opportunity of Limits’, a forum convened by the Global Footprint Network and its partners in Italy. Here is a quick snapshot/refresher of what this event was about:
‘From resource scarcity to the economic crisis, the world is ready for systemic change, Footprint Forum 2010 will be the first gathering of its kind centered on the issue of ecological limits and how they will influence the future, from the global economy and the marketplace of tomorrow to our ability to achieve our most vital human development goals.’
The stories shared and questions raised included:
- Ecuador’s Advisor, National Planning and Development Secretariat, Dania Quirola Suárez, spoke about how rights for nature have been written into the country’s constitution, and how Ecuador has committed to keeping 846 million barrels of oil in the ground, despite the fact that the country’s economy is dependent on oil. Ecuador now believes that the value of its biodiversity will offer a longer term benefit to the country than liquidating it to sell a finite resource.
- Razan Al Mubarak, Director of the Emirates Wildlife Society, told of how the review of National Footprint Accounts for the United Arab Emirates has contributed to the establishment of a national statistics agency in that country – an important milestone in a nation that has experienced incredible growth within a generation.
- Peter Victor, Professor in Environmental Studies at Canada’s York University, and author of ‘Managing Without Growth’, highlighted an issue of major concern to governments which is a barrier to acceptance of a no growth or steady state economy – that pensions and superannuation funds are COWS (Claims On Wealth) in the future, and asked how do we design a structure of claims on the economy in a steady state economy if we eschew a growth economy?
- Alessandro Galli, Global Footprint Network, Senior Scientist, asked whether in a resource constrained world, will countries rich in biocapacity be willing to sell their resources to countries who are ecologically poor, although economically rich?
- Robert Rapier, Chief Technology Officer with Merica International, gave an impassioned, informative and entertaining presentation on Peak Oil, and drew laughs with his analogy of the climate change conundrum (ie. everyone wants action, but no one wants higher energy costs) ‘Its like saying we’re all too fat, and hamburgers are too expensive’.
- The World Business Council for Sustainable Development presented their Vision 2050: ‘9 billion live well within the limits of one planet’ – a ‘north star’ goal that can be owned by civil society, policymakers and business.
- Martha Campbell, President/CEO, Venture Strategies for Health and Development, and lecturer in the School of Public Health, University of California, Berkeley, presented research which demonstrates that education of women is not the main barrier to slowing population growth as often cited. Access to family planning is the key, and women will make choices to have smaller families when they have the means to do so (physical, financial and cultural access to family planning choices), regardless of their level of education.
- Susan Burns, Global Footprint Network CEO, offered a positive way to talk about limits by observing that limits are ‘like an artist’s frame, bringing forth creativity’; and that metrics are what reveal the speed and scale of change.
- And Hannes Kunz, President of Switzerland’s Institute for Integrated Economic Research, is concerned that humanity may not have enough room left on the runway for a painless descent. Perspectives like his are important – that is, based on our efforts thus far with climate change, ending extreme poverty and arresting biodiversity loss, there is a good chance that, despite all our efforts to be upbeat and can-do, we won’t get our collective act together in time. And what are we going to do to prepare? Hannes and his organisation are the Plan-Bers, talking about how to deal with the consequences of when limits start to bite.
But what particularly captured my attention was a conversation I had with Professor William Rees of the University of British Columbia, who also delivered a keynote presentation at the Forum.
Rees, whom I call ‘The Godfather of Footprint’ co-created the Ecological Footprint concept with Global Footprint Network founder and President, Mathis Wackernagel, when Mathis was studying at UBC.
Rees’s line of research is focused on the underlying causes of humanity’s current conundrum – not just what is going wrong, but why we are persisting with behaviours that are unsustainable? Are we as a species somehow hard-wired to be unsustainable? If so, can we override our programming?
This issue is deserving of its own post – so watch this space for a subsequent article!
A worker moves bags of cement at a factory in Ningxia, China. Photo by Chang W. Lee/The New York Times.
You can’t talk about economic growth without talking about Asia. Major economies there — those of China and India in particular — are booming. And that boom is firmly tied to GDP growth: In 2010, the World Bank projects a growth rate of 9.5 percent in China, and 7.4 percent in India — with expectations of a rise to 8 and 9 percent in coming years.
Those seem like big numbers, especially in the context of financial recession.
But some voices within Asia are questioning their meaning — and wisdom. A fantastic piece popped up in the New York Times recently, titled, “Rethinking the Measure of Growth,” which weaves together a much-ignored oil spill off the coast of Singapore, China’s recent success and enthrallment with GDP, and its parallel attempt at putting together a “green” GDP measurement.
What’s most interesting about the article is that it isn’t really about measuring growth at all — it’s about asking whether growth is an important thing to think about in the first place. Here’s a quote:
“The problem is not G.D.P.,” said Bhanoji Rao, a visiting economics professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore. “The problem is the culture of consumption.”
And it gets more interesting:
But economists like Mr. Xie and Mr. Rao warn that even with greener development, the result may still be the same if the goal remains an American-style standard of living. Asia may instead need to carve out a vastly different vision of prosperity that does not rely on ever-increasing levels of material consumption.
And in what represents a bit of strange casting, some economists say the answer may lie in drawing on Asia’s religious traditions — Shinto, Taoism, Buddhism and Hinduism — with their emphasis on harmony with nature and self-denial.
“Is there any commandment from the heavens that one must have one’s own swimming pool?” Mr. Rao said. “That one must have 10 bedrooms?”
To illustrate, he cited Mahatma Gandhi’s comment about the Earth’s providing enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed.
To my mind, here’s why this is exciting: a) the core notion that “progress” is tied to economic indicators — green or not — is being questioned and b) a re-examination of local cultural traditions (Shinto, Taoist, Buddhist, Hindu) is being suggested as a way to recast the outlines of that progress.*
The air is bad in Beijing, and this is no mystery to the Chinese. The country seems torn between its rise as an economic powerhouse and the clear worsening of its physical environment — a threat which, eventually, will get in the way of everything. As Wang Jinnan, one of China’s leading environmental researchers, told the New York Times in 2007: “It is a very awkward situation for the country because our greatest achievement is also our biggest burden.”
Seems like these questions are emerging more and more from this part of the world (the connection between growth and India’s water crisis comes to mind). Can anyone share similar news from Asia?
*I’m not advocating for or against religion — just for a larger understanding of what it means to live a good life in a society that works. Part of that, I think, is rebuilding a rich and diverse cultural fabric that’ll get our minds off of growing economies and on to something a little more interesting…
The Transition Movement is about creating more resiliency in local communities in order to respond to the “Hydrocarbon Twins” of peak oil and climate change positively. It is about creating a better, more sustainable way of living in a world without oil and with an altered climate. Both of these shocks to the world are coming (probably already started) and preparing for them in a positive manner that increases community and personal resilience is definitely the horse I am betting on winning the race.
“In Transition” is a film made by the people who are pioneering this movement, who are working towards being free of oil and achieving sustainability. It’s a great flick, now available in a 2-disc DVD, but also available online and below. Check it out:
In Transition 1.0 from Transition Towns on Vimeo.
