These days we hear a great deal about the sustainability or unsustainability of intentionally endless economic growth on a finite planet. Some argue for “green growth,” and claim that we can somehow ‘decouple’ economic growth and environmental damage so that growth can continue as a key component of business-as-usual. While that view has considerable support among commercial interests, it has no logical legs nor does it comport with the facts of life on the ground. Green growth is not a thing, but the will to power is.
Everything has a Carbon Footprint
The pro-growth financial interests are not the only ones who deceived themselves with wishful thinking. Too many ‘environmentalists’ still travel on the train of linear thought, ignoring the complexities of ecosystems and climate while holding to their one-size-fits-all simplistic ‘solutions’ that only scratch the surface. The whole Earth System itself happens to be a very complex living adaptive system, edging very close to irreversible destabilization.
Complex systems are always full of surprises, especially for those who think they can fix a problem by simply changing one thing. That one thing connects with many other components of the system in complex ways, and their interactions are so complex that they border on indeterminacy.
In fact, we may be able to predict some relations among such sub-systems, but not all, nor under all conditions. Modern science has done quite well through most of the industrial era by using increasingly complex models of linear causation, but that has reached its limits. The emergence of complex-systems science has led to much-improved understanding of the world we live in.
What conventional environmentalists, along with commercial interests, do not understand is that every expenditure of energy directed at the production of anything emits carbon into the atmosphere. The oceans absorb much of it, altering their own ecosystems, etc., etc. The bottom line is that even with conversion to ‘renewable’ energy sources, we will continue to use too much energy, unless we also change the way we live in major ways.
Power and Social Values
The trajectory of the industrial era was far from a straight line, although that is how most folks envision the progress of industrial modernity. There were many zigzags along the way. In part, that worked out for many who were in the main line of techno-industrial development and the consumer society it produced. However, it is important to be aware that for most of that time the predatory extractive operations of an expanding political economy happened in the context of a world where the industrial project had not yet tapped vast troves of resources, no less exhausted the Earth’s bounty. That is no longer the case.
On top of that, the very growth that has been the core value underlying the culture and political economy of growth for capital accumulation, has itself caused increasing damage to many components of the Earth System upon which we all must rely for survival as well as for comfort and wealth.
Despite the inroads made by the rational-legal value system constructed by the political-economic hierarchy, with its ideology of economic individualism and acquisitiveness, many core human values, which some would designate as universal, survive even as they are subordinated to the values of the complex organizations upon which so many depend for survival. The requirements of organizations subordinate so much of everyday life that we must struggle to retain a modicum of empathy and compassion for other humans, and indeed for the living systems that are our brothers and sisters in the natural world.
Values, Beliefs, and the Existential Threat of System Collapse
Well, that section heading is a mouthful. But it points to the fundamental problem of life in the twenty-first Century on planet Earth. The belief system of industrial modernity pays lip service to the human values and claims to support them, but without any real commitment or action to back up such claims. Those values evolved over millennia and were the basis on which we survived together, however imperfect their implementation.
Now, because of the impact of the political economy of growth on many components of the Earth System (including elements of each of the core components of the Earth System—including the atmosphere (air), lithosphere (land), hydrosphere (water), and biosphere (living systems)—a new existential threat to the whole of humanity confronts us, and we are deeply unprepared.
Within the culture of industrial civilization, we can find no basis for even imagining the potential for full-on collapse of that civilization. The one exception is science fiction depictions of a collision with an asteroid, an invasion by aliens from a far off planet of our imagination, or the latest (possibly real) threat of extinction by artificial intelligence (AI). Yet, here we are. The very science that brought us such power over the habitats we once knew intimately as do the few remaining indigenous groups, tells us in no uncertain terms that what we have wrought turns out to be a Frankenstein Monster of global proportions.
That is hard to swallow. Nevertheless, after much lying, denial, diversion, and deceit, much of it by the likes of Exxon-Mobil, the American Petroleum Institute, and their commercial and congressional allies, most Americans now recognize the growing environmental instabilities that increasingly threaten human life. Many, of course, don’t buy the idea that such a new great transformation of the Earth is even possible or that it could force the collapse of civilization as we know it. Nevertheless, they do know that the situation is very serious.
When a potentially global catastrophe looms, the fact that we have never experienced such a thing merges with its traumatic potential to produce resistance to the validity of the prospect. The ‘deer in the headlights’ metaphor may apply. That, however, does not make it any less real. Hope rests only in facing reality.
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 