“To say that exponential growth is incompatible with a finite world and that our capacity for consumption must not exceed the biosphere’s capacity for regeneration is so obvious that few would disagree.” (Alternatives to Growth: efficiency shifting, Conrad Schmidt)
And yet, just last week, I got a call from someone attempting to see me distribution to the US, who was flabbergasted at the notion that we wouldn’t want to keep growing. I tried to explain, to show him that constant growth is the definition of cancer. He, in turn, was shocked that I would compare such a horrible disease to the basis of our economy.
The comparison, however, is valid. Cancer eats our bodies’ cells, warping them to its own goal of limitless growth. Eventually, it kills the host. Our economic philosophy devours our planet in the name of constant growth, leaving disease, malnourishment and environmental destruction in its wake. We throw huge amounts of money at cancer research, but our primary method of fighting cancer remains to bring the host as close to death as possible, in the hopes of killing the cancer cells before the host person actually keels over. Out attempts to stop either illness by throwing money and more toxins at it have already proven fruitless. Yet we are unwilling as a society to examine the root causes, or to take the steps that would create a healthier environment and stop the disease. Interestingly, some of the causes of cancer – environmental toxicity would be a catch-all for exposure to toxins in the air, water, land, food, buildings and workplaces – are the by-products of constant growth. To cure our dominant disease, I suggest, we will have to look closely at our dominant economic paradigm.
Industrialization relies on cheap fuel and cheap labour to make “stuff” – whether the eventual price tag for that stuff is cheap or expensive. But cheap labour means people can’t afford to buy anything except the cheapest products – those created with maximum exploitation of human and natural resources, with the greatest amount of offloading of long-term costs (ie. water use and pollution). But industrialization, which produces ever more stuff, needs consumers to purchase all that stuff. Without consumers, there is no profit in production. The answer has been to make more cheap products more shoddily, selling the same thing to people repeatedly over their lives, as products’ lifespans get shorter and shorter.
In other words, industrialization by its very nature depends on waste to function – for without throwing stuff away, even the most dedicated consumer simply won’t have room to buy more. So products break, cannot be repaired, and get thrown out and replaced over and over again. Waste is a constant product. Increasingly, that waste is made of plastics and circuit boards containing a multitude of toxins.
The question we seem to be asking ourselves at parties now is not “How much did you make last year?”, but “ how much did you waste?”, as consumption becomes the marker of wealth even more than actual dollars earned. But consumption doesn’t express individualism, it only exploits your function as an economic cog. So we don’t build our furniture, we buy our self-expression at The Brick – and then buy it again in a few years, tossing out the broken fiberboard and melamine. Consumption requires waste to continue, and increased waste leads directly to environmental degradation.
Economic growth is the stated goal of industrialization, the mantra of our society. We worship growth as the only meaningful indicator of success and vitality for our cities, our businesses, our countries. So far, we have stopped short of worshipping such constant growth in our children or our cells. Economic growth, though, requires population growth to provide cheap labour and more consumers. We panic when we hear the words “negative birth rate”. But that increased population is not the beneficiary of industrialization and capitalism: the owners receive the profits, not the workers.
Population growth is also, interestingly, an outcome of poverty. As education and income increase, the number of children per family decreases. So industrialization requires poverty to assist in maintaining population as workers and consumers.
Increasing production demands increased consumption, and despite population growth, waste and built-in obsolescence are necessary tools to increase consumption. The more we shop, the more we throw away. The more we grow, the more we pollute. The more we insist on economic growth, the more we deepen poverty and the destruction of the ecosystem.
Again, our capacity for destruction must not exceed the capacity of the biosphere to regenerate. To assume that somehow, it will all be OK, and that we’ll somehow get away with our current course of heedless growth, consumption and waste, is pure wishful thinking and wilful blindness.
Unlike the cancer in our bodies, we have the ability to amend our behaviour and seek a balance. Constant growth is a disease, and by choosing sustainability, we are on the side of the white blood cells.
Hmmm… food for thought. I’m reminded also about the trendy ideology that today’s consumer has about recycling. It’s wonderful that we are all recycling but I question the concept of unloading our recyclables at depots to be sorted and stuffed into huge bundles of paper, metal, and plastic to be trucked to some ocean vessel to sail to the other side of the world where our recyclables are melted down and recycled into something new; to be shipped back to this side of the world and resold to us in a different form. How much fossil fuel is burned every year to accommodate our attitude towards recycling which allows us to feel good so we can continue to consume with a clear conscience?
I love it! And it’s true, the marvelous thing about human beings is that we have a choice, to be a cancer, or to be beings on the Earth. On the other hand, the depressing thing about humans is the they are so fecking stupid and with few exceptions will make the wrong decision every time…
I think it is rather suspicious that at such a critical junction in the battle for sustainability, the American people are looking largely at recycling as the only means of becoming “part of the solution and not part of the problem”. When we choose to recycle as our only means of achieving this; a necessary state of sustainability, and forgo the reduction of consumption and the reusing of our effects, we are playing into the hands of industrialized market.
Industry has made recycling into a market now. All industry is run by the market agenda, to make a profit. Industry has made this profit in part by selling continually cheaper products to consumers.
Now, industry is making a profit again. Not only has the industry profited from the sale of toxic waste like plastic and heavy metals, VOC’s and PCB’s, but they will again, reconverting it into further inferior products, (not always but many times very inferior), and selling them again. Sometimes saving more money buying the recycled materials, then had been needed in the original. Even if in one particular market a recycled material is more expensive than the original material, the product produced by the recycled materials can still cost consumers less than the original. People are then motivated to buy the recycled item and the company make a profit. All the while, maintaining a facade of green ethics when in fact profit is the motivation.
Reduction and reuse remove the consumer form the profit. Companies cannot make a profit from me if I simply am no longer buying their products; this is the case with reduced consumption. I will not need to continue buying industries’ products if I reuse as much as possible all of my effects. Also, I would like to note that if I am not buying industries products nor wasting what I have, I have nothing to recycle.
What is the agenda of American Industry when it makes recycling its main approach to sustainability? Industry profits thru wasteful consumer habits.
If the focus of the people’s efforts to cure the cancerous consumer growth occurring now is not shifted from one of only recycling, to one encompassing recycling, reducing, reusing and eliminating waste for the sake of the corporate profits, then the American people will have been duped. They will have been duped into selling themselves off to the masters of maximized profits and marketing. But what really will it cost us?