If 24 hours were to represent the one million years of human history on Earth, "everything from the steam engine to the search engine fits into the past 21 seconds," writes Stephen Stoll in Fear of Fallowing (Harper's Magazine, Mar.'08). The radical changes wrought during these few moments began in the 18th century when the burning of coal and then oil replaced the limited power of human and animal muscle. These fossil fuels vastly multiplied our ability to do work and alter our surroundings.
The economic, social and cultural changes were equally staggering. "Amplified production resulted in more robust consumption," writes Stoll, "causing an outward shift in wealth, investment, employment and production – a positive feedback loop" promising to fulfil the most extravagant of human desires.
Many early economists were rhapsodic in their praise of this new industrial system. The prospect of having whatever we could dream became the implicit message in the ascending spiral of production and consumption. Affluence became the adhesive holding together a culture excited by expectation. In referring to the thinking of Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman (The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth), Stoll reminds us that "a basic materialism underlies tolerance and political civility" as the tenuous "social bond" in such a society.
The vested interest we have in the success of rising rates of production and consumption is enormous and profound. We would have difficulty imagining a way of life that did not continue to expand toward a horizon of endless promise.
However, as Stoll points out, "growth and ecology operate by different rules.... Economies might expand, ecosystems do not." After 250 years of industrialization, we are now having to confront the collision of economic activity with ecological limits. The biosphere will only tolerate so much carbon dioxide, the seas will only yield so much fish, the forests will only supply so much wood, the soil will only grow so much food, and the planet's mantle will only furnish finite minerals.
Both economists and "industrial ecologists", Stoll notes, like to think that the problem of scarcities can be solved by "substitution" – if greater efficiencies are not possible, then use different materials, eat tilapia instead of tuna. But by ecological measures, claiming benefit by feeding South American anchovies and Arctic krill to farmed salmon as a replacement for wild salmon is a delusion rather than a solution. Dumping wastes into the air and water is not disposal. Exporting dirty industries to Third World countries is only the illusion of pollution abatement – China has become our dirty industrial heartland, the place where we have "externalized the externalities of our consumption". We can't extract more groundwater than the aquifers provide. As for oil, we can't expect to always find more. And oil, as Stoll ominously reminds us, "is not simply implicated in everything we call growth. There has never been growth without it."
Stoll alludes to the ideas of Herman Daly, an American economist who argues for fallowing, an "investment in short-term non-production in order to maintain long term yields." Although this would seem to be "tantamount to the end of progress", it deserves serious consideration as a strategy for reconciling the conflict between economy and ecology. The only likely way to save the world's ocean fisheries will be to designate at least one-third of the sea as marine reserves. According to Bill McKibben in Deep Economics, China's deputy environment minister has admitted that his country's great economic miracle "will end soon because the environment can no longer keep pace."
McKibben's book makes another significant point. In developed countries, he notes, "Growth is no longer making people wealthier, but instead generating inequality and insecurity." Continually increasing economic activity, it would seem, does not necessarily translate into greater contentment or happiness but can become a laborious treadmill of compulsive consumption that yields no further benefits. Perhaps materialism can only provide a certain level of enrichment, while further economic effort produces only frantic lifestyles, frayed nerves and ruined ecologies. Even in 1848, as Stoll notes, the English philosopher and political economist, John Stewart Mill, argued that "the increase of wealth is not boundless."
"Stationary states" of no economic growth are not historically unknown. For example, during the 256 years of the Edo Period from 1603 until 1867, Japan's 30 million people lived in total geographic isolation (see Watershed Sentinel, Jan./Feb. '08). Their population was stable, their lives were culturally rich, they resided peacefully with each other, and their economy was wholly enclosed and sustainable.
We are unlikely to accomplish this in today's global world. But we can move in such a direction. As the Edo Period demonstrated, economic and cultural energy can be turned inward to invigorate and enrich rather than outward to expand and exploit. The present collision between economic growth and ecological limits warns that we cannot continue along our current course without dire consequences.
How we change course – which we must eventually do – will be complex and challenging. It will defy today's sense of progress. But it will not wreck economies; it will re-direct them toward inner richness and outer sustainability. This is the difficult work we must begin if the next few seconds of our second day on Earth are to continue with promise and optimism.