“You cannot maintain an economy on a static set of principles i.e. have no-growth economy because if you freeze you economy development then you fix your economy to resource base that is shrinking exponentially”

Our resource base is not “shrinking exponentially”. Our appetites, and our willingness (and eagerness) to always sate them and never EVER restrict them, have expanded exponentially. This phenomenon (pardon me, but I must speak plainly) is mistaken by idiots, or is cynically mischaracterized by the evil, as either a shrinking of the resource base, and/or as overpopulation.

The problem is not overpopulation, nor is it the shrinking of the resource base. The problem, as always, is us.

People have a right to their own property, and can do with it what they like, as long as they don’t infringe on the rights of others, including polluting the resources of other people.

The growth that you are talking about is the artificial growth from monetary pumping and government fiscal stimulus that distorts all economic relations, skews the real incentives in the markets and takes from one group to make another group wealthy, i.e. the massive corporate welfare.

Great post, Septeus7, other than a little incoherence regarding the cancelling of all debt and the collective investment ideas. It sounds like you are blaming “boomers” for something that socialized government created with laws, fiscal incentives and regulations. You would be more effective if you directed your anger at the right target.

“Let us posit that the three greatest perils we face are resource depletion (particularly oil, but don’t forget fish and fresh water, for example), global warming and the alteration of habitats and species, and an excessive human impact on the planet at all levels. They are all the result of unchecked economic growth, and on a planetary scale. If we continue business as usual we will surely meet up with their disastrous consequences.

The alternative? Nothing complicated: a non-growth ecnonomy. A human-scale economy. A steady-state economy.”

Yes, let’s ignore Genesis 1:26-28 and have a global dark age. Let’s destroy civilization and call ourselves conservatives.

τὰ ὄντα ἰέναι τε πάντα καὶ μένειν οὐδέν
There is no such thing a steady-state anywhere in the universe much less the human economy. You cannot even maintain current population levels unless you expand your productive and technological capacity.

Humanity doesn’t not live like other animals and adjusts to a “natural equilibrium” just like the planets do not organize themselves around an equant. The purpose of civilization is to provide for the possibility of development so as to increase man’s power to exist beyond what previous state of nature allowed by economical growth.

If you say let’s stop economic growth then you are saying let’s stop civilization and have some kind of Rousseauian fantasy then you aren’t a conservative.

Resources are always being depleted. From the moment man creates a resource there is a limit to how much he can get out of that resource. But where is the resource ultimately located?

Are resources located in nature objectively or are resources subjective to man when he discovers a principle that allows him to master a part of nature around him in order to increase his power to exist in nature?

Oil is no resource to a primitive tribe who doesn’t understand principles of chemistry that allow them to use that energy.

You cannot maintain an economy on a static set of principles i.e. have no-growth economy because if you freeze you economy development then you fix your economy to resource base that is shrinking exponentially and the only result will mass genocide and universal war.

So what is the proper human response to the depletion of know resources? The answer is not a scientifically impossible “steady state” but what human have always done in order to survive. We develop new resources and switch to from old resource bases to new resources. When we do that population increases and the economy grows and that is only way human beings have ever survived in civilization.

So what is our problem? Boomers like you assume apriori that no new resources can be developed and that we are at “the end of history” and so deny that nuclear power should be developed. The result was that the boomers sat on their butts doing nothing to advance civilization for the last 40 years and let our culture rot and ran up the debt, destroyed the environment, and now you have the gall to tell the younger generations that they will just have to accept no-growth, de-population, and fascist austerity.

We can fix the economy. How? It is easy we cancel the debt you idiot Boomers created under great globalization orgy of stupidity using bankruptcy protection. Arrest anyone who tries to enforce this civilization destroying usurious debt and create a new global finance based on rule of law and the sovereignty of nations not the so-called “free market” i.e. private banking cartels. And finally we create investment programs to produce the infrastructure that the Boomer should have built and whole bunch of elemental recycling plants to clean up the giant mess the boomers left lying around and is now smelling up the place.

“The idea of a steady-state economy was spelled out by John Stuart Mill in the middle of the 19th century, and has been taken up and amplified by a whole host of thinkers in recent times, including Herman Daly, Kenneth Boulding, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Leopold Kohr, Hazel Henderson, Howard Odum-oh, and myself (Human Scale, 1980).”

Actually the idea goes back the Cypria where Zeus the archetype of Oligarchy allows for the Trojan War to end overpopulation.

American patriots have long battled the anti-human ideas of the Imperialist shills for the East India Company like John Stuart Mill a true disciple of Malthus.

My response is the traditional American response to such nonsense:

Two systems are before the world. . . . One looks to
pauperism, ignorance, depopulation, and barbarism;
the other to increasing wealth, comfort, intelligence,
combination of action, and civilization. One looks toward
universal war; the other to universal peace. One
is the English system; the other we may be proud to
call the American system, for it is the only one ever
devised, the tendency of which was that of elevating
while equalizing the condition of man throughout the
world.
—Henry C. Carey, Harmony of Interests, 1851

Not to mention, there are no doubt 10 times 400 million plastic styrofoam packing peanuts with their little static charge floating out there in that archipelago of discarded plastic in the North Pacific gyre.

I believe it is easy to overrate the differences in the future quality of life we will experience between choosing a sustainable future and the continuing in direction we are pointed now. However, I believe the longer we continue down the path of economic growth as the central principal of our one party system, the steeper the descent will be when the limits to growth can no longer be denied. So yes, I will miss the MRI if it comes to that, but I feel sooner we own up to our past errors the more MRI’s will be around.

(Of the economists mentioned in Dr. Sale’s article have only read Leopold Kohr, and I was a little surprised E.F. Schumacher did not make his list of thinkers. Is there something I am missing?)

“Conservation is a Conservative Ethos. It needs to come from the bottom up and not top down.”

Yes, I do agree, we don’t need no stinkin’ gummint writing enviro policy predicated on the politics of morons.

I did the anti-haz waste incinerator (a Bubba deal straight from Arkansas) with the Greenpeace kumbaya dudes/dudettes while trying to explain to them the high politics of John Randolph.

The short answer is, no. It seems everyone is frantically searching for ways to keep what we have even as the lifeblood of modern civilization, carbon based energy, is entering an era of irreversible decline. That is not an option. It is childish fantasy to believe we can somehow seamlessly transition from a century of economic expansion fueled by cheap energy to some form(s) of green energy that will allow us to keep all the goodies we now have. That doesn’t mean that we will return to living in caves, but it does mean that we will certainly have to forgo many of the energy intensive benefits now taken for granted

If we are lucky we may be able to establish a lifestyle somewhat in keeping with the standard of living of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. But there should be no illusion that we will somehow get there without some pain. Sadly, an energy constrained world cannot sustain a population of more than six billion people. That is simple reality.

Well said. The most sustainable culture will show itself quite clearly by a simple sign: that culture will produce children. I say this not in some spirit of dreamy optimism, but with all empirical evidence suggesting as much.

If any readers would like an example of the dellusionary logic (ideology) that keeps us from solving so many of the problems Gordon otherwise righly perceives, it is thus: so many persons persist in believe that somehow “population” is the problem. There is no population problem; population is, as it were and quite literally, the people for whose benefit the problem, whatever it may be, must be solved. The problem is simply modifying our present practices to make possible a virtuous life for many people; it is a vice, not a virtue, to consider politics, people, and populations as problems to be solved. And yet that is the spirit of technocracy: manipulate, manipulate, manipulate.

Cheeks, I don’t particularly like the term “Global Warming”. I think it more complex that that and to those who assert that the science has not yet proven the connection between mans activities and global climate changes, I reply so f**#king what. When you are rolling about in your soiled diaper and treating the ecosystem as a seedy branch of some Off Track Betting Parlor, It cannot hurt to alter your ways regardless of what is going on in the larger environment. We are, as a people, staggering drunks, heedless of anything beyond a 7 day time horizon and largely devoid of any fundamental biological ethics. Heedless is a good word…a bad idea with the population growth rate and industrialization today.

The better term would be “Global Climate Dynamics”…but this aint sexy enough for the popular culture. I deal a lot with precipitation and storm runoff. For the last 10 years, while the average temperature has risen during a trend with some really cold winters….colder than a period 20 years ago, I have watched as the pattern of storms in New England have distinctly altered, accelerating in this alteration over the last 3-4 years and we are having more repetitive, more frequent shorter duration, higher peak rate storm events that are causing greater erosion, more runoff, less of the soaking rains and even in undeveloped woodlands, streams are entrenching at a rate which leaves rootlets exposed…in other words, very quickly. One part of long term desertification is entrenching stream systems lowering local groundwater elevations and altering plant cover. I don’t really care a whit whether this is man-caused, nature caused or a combination, the bottom line is that we need to, as a species, develop a far more sophisticated way of living within the landscape….socially, ecologically, agriculturally , industrially etc etc. This “Is Global Warming true” or “Caused by man” debate is a distraction from the essential issue that we perfervid but lazy and gluttonous homo sapiens sapiens are failing to practice the wisdom we are capable of to the extent that we are now crowning our long bloodthirsty career with being our own best and final predator. Conservation is a Conservative Ethos. It needs to come from the bottom up and not top down.

The IJIT “End of History” Neo-Cons would have one believe we have hit a triumphal point in history where American Might and Right will be gloriously exported to a larger world that just needs to get on board in order to turn the vaunted American Way into the Global Way. Solly Cholly, it don’t compute.

We have followed a paradigm in which the carrying capacity of the planet could be ignored while we raised standards of living , wealth, health and comfort to remarkable levels. It was a marvelous ride, in some ways, its still a good ride but the bloom is off the rose. This gig is over and we are so invested in it, we are continuing to ignore the need to follow the opportunity of a different paradigm. Yes, OPPORTUNITY. We are confronting a remarkable economic, social and environmental opportunity , larger than the 90′s internet age bubble but it requires a little imagination and courage and is steadfastly resisted within the Fortune 500 crowd and so resisted in Washington. We get lip service and lip service don’t saddle the horses.

What leads to the “angst” is that we are well past the prudent time to deal with the issue and we were just given a world class demonstration of what not to do by the last 16 years and when we had the people ready to listen, nobody in the leadership class stood up and went to bat beyond platitude.

In the coming years, deteriorating services amidst inflation may be the least of our worries.

“And population control is only the beginning of a huge number of rational decisions our species would be required to make to survive, most of which would be unacceptable to the present wealthy and religious leaders of the world who are the main drivers of the problem.”

Yes, all those religious leaders in the West who have been so successful at encouraging the most wasteful people on the planet to keep growing their populations… er, hold on.

Actually, the problem is not that there are too many people in the world, but that there are too many people like me and you, who consume hundreds of people-units of resources without even having any children to justify the expenditure. You may rightly blame wealthy ‘religious’ Westerners for that, but not for reproducing too much. We’re committing demographic suicide, actually, if you haven’t heard.

Ironically, our refusal to have children is a symptom of our anti-local, anti-commitment, anti-self-control economy. Children are now an economic asset, rather than a liability; yet another victim of global capitalism.

The reality, which few people are willing to admit, is that there are no simple solutions. Any realistic solution, such as ensuring a steady-state population as a precursor to modifying our economic and political systems is not even on the table for discussion, nor will it ever be. And population control is only the beginning of a huge number of rational decisions our species would be required to make to survive, most of which would be unacceptable to the present wealthy and religious leaders of the world who are the main drivers of the problem.

I personally think as a species we are incapable of solving this dilemma. Touting quick and easy solutions does not help to resolve the issues, but only serves to muddy clear thinking.