How Much is Enough?

“The world has witnessed an unprecedented explosion in the consumptive through-put of just about everything. For example, roughly half the fossil fuel ever burned has been consumed in just the past 30 years. Meanwhile, the material effect of globalization has been to expose the world’s remaining pockets of resources to growing numbers of expectant and increasingly affluent consumers.” (Bill Rees, Professor Emeritus @ University of British Columbia/Co-Founder of One Earth) At a conference in 2017 Bill talked about our many constructs, the ones we live by and for. He found it curious that we’d stopped considering them – had accepted them as almost sacred – forgetting that these constructs are of our own invention – that some, if not all, are due for an overhaul, discarding those that have little to do with our 21st century reality. He suggested, it’s time to think again.

Mark Blyth in an interview recently offered this: "I look at it this way. We have 15 years to solve and really make a dent in a joint crisis. That joint crisis is one of the environment and one of inequality. And the two of them are linked. If we do that then we could be in a much better place. If we don’t do that, this is the [most] serious challenge that capitalism as a model has faced since its inception."

So when is enough enough?

Professor Rees uses an analogy of a small body of water to further his point: A pond has one water lily on it. The lilies double every day leading to a pond covered in lilies on day 30. When is it one quarter full? Half full? The pond is a quarter full on day 28, half full on day 29, and completely covered on day 30. Most of the action takes place on the final three days of the experiment. Bill’s belief is that we are at day 29 with regards to resources and our ability to do anything about climate change. In conjunction with that, scientists have recently set the Doomsday Clock at two minutes to midnight. Time to reskill our communities. What follows is part of a paper that Professor Rees put together. It is a straight/no chaser article and I think worth a read… Agree or disagree or pick and choose what you agree and/or disagree with – I believe Bill’s plan comes from an active imagination – from a spirit that believes in the power of community, locally and internationally, and is a thoughtful inquiry into a possible path forward.

FRAMING AN ACTION PLAN: ARE WE UP TO THE TASK?

We, like Ahab and his crew, rationalize madness. All calls for prudence, for halting the march toward environmental catastrophe, for sane limits on carbon emissions, are ignored or ridiculed. Even with the flashing red lights before us, the increased droughts, rapid melting of glaciers and Arctic ice, monster tornadoes, vast hurricanes, crop failures, floods, raging wildfires and soaring temperatures, we bow slavishly before hedonism and greed and the enticing illusion of limitless power, intelligence and prowess. Chris Hedges’s analogy of the world community and the crew of the Pequod in Melville’s Moby Dick describes a world in deep denial. Is this an inevitable response to crisis or is there another way? How might a more mindfully conscious world address the (un)sustainability conundrum? Here is some rationale and major elements for a truly transformational approach to sustainability planning. The proposed strategy will seem impossibly extreme to some so-called practical people. However, unlike mainstream solutions, it is consistent with the dire implications of growth-induced global change. In particular, it recognizes that global-scale ecological and social turmoil ushers in a unique phase in human history.

Climate change has already disrupted the lives of millions, and eventually everyone will suffer the consequences of systemic collapse. No individual can implement the policies necessary (e.g. carbon taxes, resource quotas) to significantly reduce their ecological footprint or revamp the social programs needed for social stability. No country, however virtuous, can be sustainable on its own or remain insulated from global turmoil. Thus, the so-called developed world, long steeped in the rhetoric of competitive individualism, must now grapple with the notion that individual and national interests have all but converged with humanity’s common interests. Unsustainability is a collective problem that demands collective solutions. Arguably, civilization will not survive without recognition that we are all on the same fragile spaceship whose safe passage depends on unprecedented inter-institutional cooperation at all spatial scales. Working co-operatively for the common good will require the ardent exercise of several intellectual and behavioural qualities that are unique (or nearly so) to our species:

? high intelligence, the capacity to reason logically from available facts and data;

? the ability to plan ahead, to direct the course of events toward desired ends;

? an unequalled array of socio-behavioural means and mechanisms for co-operation;

? the capacity for moral judgment, the ability to distinguish right from wrong; and…

? the ability to empathize with other people and even non-human species and to exercise compassion toward “the other.” (It is worth noting that certain of these capacities have been deliberately repressed in the sociopolitical discourse of recent decades.)

The starting point for any contemporary survival strategy should be to embrace a possibility that mainstream governments and international agencies have thus far been loath to contemplate (at least in the public arena): in coming decades, the human enterprise will likely be forced to contract.

Two basic scenarios bookend the range of contraction possibilities.

1) BUSINESS AS USUAL Any sustained effort to maintain the growth-based status quo risks triggering systemic collapse in the form of either uncontrollable climate change, wide-spread ecological destruction and the loss of essential life-support functions or diminishing returns to investment in resources, commodity shortages, rising costs/ prices, competition for capital, unrepayable indebtedness and increasing social disparity. Either set of conditions (or some combination) defines a path to economic implosion, civil insurrection, geopolitical turmoil and resource wars.

2) A CO-OPERATIVE, WELL-PLANNED ORDERLY DESCENT In theory, the global community is capable of deliberately planning and executing a “prosperous way down” and still has the resources to do so. The goals would be to restore and maintain the ecosphere while ensuring social order and reasonable economic security for all. As noted above, this approach requires a complete transformation of national and global development paradigms. Can there be any doubt which end of the spectrum an objective member of an intelligent, forward thinking, plan-capable, morally astute and (mostly) co-operative species should choose? An orderly contraction is the only viable means to a just sustainability and this, in turn, implies nothing less than a deliberate rewrite of contemporary society’s grand cultural narrative. In particular, the world would have to abandon its core myths of perpetual progress and material growth and focus instead on degrowth toward a sustainable steady state with greater equity.The contemporary growth economy is an unsustainable social construct. We need to replace it with an ecologically benign and socially equitable no-growth variant. Rewriting the social contract consistent with the principles of community, co-operation and people’s common interest in an orderly transition, the World Assembly would generate guidelines for individual nations to renew the social contract and repair social safety nets. National plans would include programmatic tax reform based on recognition that taxation is society’s means of pooling resources in service of the common good, particularly in times of widespread threat. Specific elements of the program might include:

? A return to more progressive taxation policies encompassing income, capital gains, estate and corporate taxes;

? Using taxes and positive incentives to promote a shift from private capital accumulation to investment in public infrastructure (e.g. transit, community facilities) and human development;

? Recognition that a negative income tax (e.g. guaranteed basic income) may be necessary to assist low-income families through the transition and to ensure access to the basics for life;

? Investment in job training and job placement. Obsolete, unsustainable “sunset” industries must be phased out (e.g. coal-based electricity generation) and workers will need new skills for employment in emerging sunrise industries (e.g. solar energy technologies, passivhaus building);

? Capitalizing on the advantages of a shorter work week and job-sharing to reduce unemployment and improve people’s work/life balance (self-actualization);

? Other measures to promote full employment; and…

? Implementing state-assisted family planning programs everywhere to stabilize/reduce human populations.

Bringing it back home: relocalization, Those people…living in relatively self-reliant, organic, village-scale settlements should be able to ride the change with minimal difficulty and will emerge into the post-civilization phase intact. The bad news is that evidently things still have to get much worse before we will muster the courage and clarity to try to make them better. The “good news” is that things are indeed getting worse.