Obsession with growth is behind much of what ails us as a society

WHAT DO SOARING HOUSING prices, climate change, racial tensions and terrorism have in common? They can all be mitigated with the reversal of our unsustainable fixation on growth.

In fact, many of the problems plaguing the planet – most of them the result of our success as a species and our failures as human beings – could be lessened by focusing on a degrowth mantra.

Our long fixation on growth now threatens the physical world – even just our numbers threaten flora and fauna with reckless abandon, let alone the myriad activities changing the very environment we all share – and the societies we’ve created over many, many generations.

The obsession with growth, however, has been around long enough that no one alive remembers otherwise, though the effects have certainly grown worse if you’ve been around a while.

Economist Herman Daly, a longtime advocate of steady state economics rather than the damaging growth model, points out that what we have today is really a historical aberration that got rolling with the Industrial Revolution, a fateful time for our societies.

“We have lived for 200 years in a growth economy. That makes it hard to imagine what a steady-state economy (SSE) would be like, even though for most of our history mankind has lived in an economy in which annual growth was negligible. Some think a SSE would mean freezing in the dark under communist tyranny. Some say that huge improvements in technology (energy efficiency, recycling) are so easy that it will make the adjustment both profitable and fun,” he writes of the steady state alternative.

“Regardless of whether it will be hard or easy we have to attempt a SSE because we cannot continue growing, and in fact so-called ‘economic’ growth already has become uneconomic. The growth economy is failing. In other words, the quantitative expansion of the economic subsystem increases environmental and social costs faster than production benefits, making us poorer not richer, at least in high consumption countries.”

Daly’s idea fit right in to the growing trend of small and local, already moving beyond farming, where we first started catching on to the fact food produced close to home on family farms provides widespread benefits.

In the bigger picture, a return to localized activities and small-scale farming are part of the degrowth model, an alternative to the growth mantra that permeates our culture.

Today, the entire system of government and the economy are both predicated on growth. None of our politicians at any level is talking about reversing that trend, even though constant growth is by definition impossible. Life on a finite planet makes that clear.

The environmental impact of human activity is the clearest indicator of where growth is a problem. We use up nonrenewable resources and we spew pollutants into the air, water and soil. That can’t go on forever.

Nor can we continue to pave over land, especially productive farmland, in perpetuity. That, of course, is one of the arguments made in favour of the transit system: the war on suburban sprawl.

As French economist Serge Latouche, one of the leaders of the degrowth movement, points out, we live in a society that is obsessed by growth economics – growth for growth’s sake. It’s an obsession that no longer serves us.

“What if the very idea of growth – accumulating riches, destroying the environment and worsening social inequality – is a trap? Maybe we need to aim to create a society that is based on quality not quantity, on cooperation and not competition,” he writes in one of his recent treatises on the subject.

Our current lifestyle has a dramatic impact on the Earth. We consume at a rate beyond sustainability, with each of us putting a claim on an increasingly large chunk of the planet’s surface to make possible our consumerist tendencies.

The average person in the United States consumes the equivalent of 9.6 hectares of land, in Canada 7.2 and in Europe 4.5. We are a long way from planetary equality and even further from a sustainable civilization which would require consumption levels below 1.4 hectares, even before accounting for population change, he says.

While we’ve recognized some of the perils, if only in little ways, our efforts have been largely ineffective. Yes, we separate our trash into various recyclable components. Yes, we look at ways to make items with fewer materials. Yes, we try to get greater fuel efficiency out of our vehicles. But the ecological damage of extreme growth continues because there are more of us consuming more goods as increasing numbers of products come to the market. With technology, we see built-in obsolescence and rapid turnover fueled by our desire for the latest and greatest, for instance.

It adds up to trouble today, with more to come if we continue down this road, Latouche argues.

“The growth society causes inequality and injustice to rise; the well-being it does produce is often illusory; even for the rich, society is neither convivial nor agreeable, but an antisociety, sick with its own wealth. The high quality of life that most people in the North believe that they enjoy is increasingly an illusion. They may spend more on consumer goods and services, but they forget to deduct the costs of these things: reductions in the quality of life because of poor air and water and a degraded environment.”

With this, Latouche takes aim at what economists have long called externalities: transferring to society the costs of production while the profits go to individuals and companies. If we’re going to change the system, we’re going to have to take aim at that practice.

Along with controls over the worst of capitalism’s excesses – what we’ve just seen first-hand in the mar-

ket meltdown led by the greed of the financial sector – we may have to use market mechanisms to mold the corporate structure into a more civil form. That, says Latouche, means making companies responsible for the total cost of their activities, not just pollution but transportation costs, employment programs and education, for example.

The system depends on society – governments and citizens – to bear the cost of the infrastructure, both hard and soft, without which corporations couldn’t operate. Forced to take that into consideration when making business decisions, companies would likely take a different tack, one more local, decentralized and human in scale.