The
planet is running out of resources, and
humanity is
living beyond its
means.
At
the end of July, the
International Monetary Fund warned of a
“gloomy outlook” for the world
economy. It was doing so not
because of a spike in poverty, a
widening of inequality, or a surge
in carbon emissions. Quite the
contrary: the IMF was making its
pessimistic assessment because it
was revising down its forecast for
global GDP growth for 2022 from
3.6 percent to 3.2 percent. In
otherwords, the global economy was
growing, but
not
enough, and
that for the IMF was cause for
concern.
At
the same time that the IMF was
making its announcement, the
U.S.government was trying
to
dispel concerns
that
a second successive quarter of
economic contraction—adecline of
.9 percent that followed a 1.6
percent decrease in the first
quarter of 2022—meant that the
country was on the vergeof a
recession. The U.S. economy was
not growing, and that for the
government was cause for even
greater concern.
Economic
expansion remains the yardstick of
success at the global and
nationallevels. Robust growth garners
positive headlines; anemic growth and
contraction generate anxious forecasts.
This remains the case despitethe widely
acknowledged link between economic
growth and the climate crisis, a
connection reinforced during the COVID
pandemic when carbonemissions dropped
considerably as a result of the economic
shutdowns in many countries.
"The
goal of almost all economists
and politicians is continued
economicgrowth,” explains Josh
Farley, a professor in Community
Development & Applied
Economics and Public
Administration at theUniversity
of Vermont, in a
Zoom seminar sponsored
by
Global Just Transition. “For
anyone who knows anything
aboutcomplex systems, exponential
growth is always ephemeral. It
cannot be sustained in any finite
system. Exponential growth must
always collapse.”
One way of
postponing collapse, and to combine
growth and environmental protection, has
been “sustainable development.” But as
Ashish Kothari, the co-founder of
Kalpavriksh Environmental ActionGroup in
India, points out, “even sustainable
development is a very superficial way of
trying to deal with the multiple crises
thatwe are in. It doesn’t address the
structural roots of the crises, which
can be found in much older systems of
racism andpatriarchy or new systems of
capitalism and nation-state domination.”
More
recently, the “Green New Deal” has been
an effort tocombine decarbonization with
an economic shift to clean energy that
nevertheless promises a growth in jobs
and benefits to disadvantaged
communities. “The Green New Deal faces
opposition and also resistance from
movements and governments in the Global
South because it is seen as a northern
approach,” says Dorothy Guerrero, the
head of policy and advocacy at Global
Justice Now in the United Kingdom. “It
is indeed a big task for Green New Deal
politics to counter that view that it’s
a northern alternative and breakdown the
prevailing neo-liberal politics that
pits workers and jobs against
environment.”
More radical
attempts have been made to identify
economic models that arenot predicated
on exponential growth. Some of these are
national-level models of a
“steady-state” economy. Others focus on
local alternatives that stress more
democratic politics and a more
integrated approach to nature. But as
Katharine Nora Farrell,an associate
professor in the Faculty of Natural
Sciences at the Universidad del Rosario
in Bogota, notes, the challenge is not
just theoretical or even practical, but
moral as well.
“We need
to take responsibility in social and
economic contexts for our role in
stipulating how systems function,”
she notes. “The failure to face up
to this is part of the problem. It’s
embarrassing to say that ‘I have
these good things because you are
being exploited.’ It’s hard to be
moral toward someone when you
discover that you have your heel on
their neck.”
Unsustainable
economic growth relies on just such a
heel: on the necks of
workers,marginalized communities and
nature itself. But that growth is now
coming under enhanced scrutiny and
greater criticism, from within thestatus
quo and from those who have suffered the
most from its effects.
The
Problem
with Growth
For
3,000 years, until 1750,
economic growth per person averaged about
.01 percent per year. After 1750
and the beginning of the
IndustrialRevolution, however,
that rate went up to 1.5 percent.
To express this radical change a
different way, the global economy
took 6,000years to double before
1750. Afterward, the economy
doubled every 50 years.
“When the
World Bank says that there’s 3.2
percent economic growth,that doubles
the size of the global economy every
24 years,” Josh Farley notes. “In
the past 100 years, we’vequadrupled
the human population and increased
the per capita consumption nine-fold
for a 36-fold increase in the size
of theeconomy. That can’t be
sustained.”
One popular
image of economic growth is a rising
tide that lifts allboats. But in
reality, economic growth lifts yachts
much higher than dinghies. “All forms of
monetary wealth grow much faster thanthe
economy as a whole,” Farley continues.
“Not only is this unsustainable, we’re
systematically transferring ourresources
to the owners of capital.” Similarly,
the growth in interest-bearing debt
“shifts resources from debtors
tocreditors, the people that the
government gave the right to create
money out of thin air.”
Farley uses
two comparisons to drive home the
unsustainability of growth.“If your
lilies are doubling in a pond every few
days so that in 30 days it’s full, when
is the pond half full? In 29 days.So, if
we use up half our oil, it’s all used up
after one more doubling period,” he
says. “I was growing exponentially until
I reached 18 and then I stopped growing.
We’ve all reached maturity and we need
to stop growing,”
Economic
growth is also unsustainable because it
requires enormous inputs of resources,
and those resources are limited. The
climate crisis is one indication of many
that economic growth has outstripped the
resource capacities of the planet. “The
Biden administration’s plan calls for a
shift to electric cars,” Ashish Kothari
points out. “That sounds good but where
will all the mining take place to get
all the materials for those cars? Again,
this is based on the inequality between
north and south, including patterns of
consumption.”
Yet, as
Dorothy Guerrero adds, a consensus is
emerging that humanity hasto reduce its
reliance on these resources. “The idea
of leaving fossil fuels in the ground
has gained legitimacy as the most viable
response to climate change,” she
explains. “The political consensus among
climate activists and scientists is that
renewable energy must now be
fast-tracked and developed where it is
not developed.”
“We need
to develop an economy whose main
goal is not growth but secure
sufficiency for all,” concludes Josh
Farley. “Our planet is too small to
achieve much more than sufficiency.
More and more consumption can no
longer be our goal. We should
instead be focusing on systems in
which production is fun.
Collaborating with others tomeet our
basic needs should be our reward.”
The
Role
of Markets
Economic
growth is at the heart of capitalism,
and markets have played acentral role in
generating growth.
“Capitalism
is
defined by private property rights,
individual choice,competition, and
pursuit of individual profit,” Josh
Farley points out. “But for the
social dilemmas that we’re
facing—global climate change, loss
of biodiversity, loss of the ozone
layer—private property rights are
not worth talking about, and
individual choice is impossible. I
cannot choose how stable a climate I
want. We are faced with situations
in which the physical
characteristics of the resources are
no long compatible with a capitalist
system. This isn’t to say that we
necessarily eliminate capitalism
altogether, but we can’t rely on it
to solve certain problems.”
The
capitalist system encompasses much of
the world, north and south. But markets,
despite the ideology of a disinterested
“invisible hand,” favor certain parts of
the world over others.
"In
addressing the current climate
emergency, who will reap the
benefits and who will pay for the
costs of the adjustment?” asks
Dorothy Guerrero. “There has been an
unequal ecological exchange between
core countries and countries on the
periphery. We need to address the
issue of monopoly capitalism where,
in the case of vaccines,
corporations have introduced
life-saving vaccines for their own
profit. The transition to clean
energy—whether it’s orderly or
destructive, peaceful or violent,
market-led or regulated—will be
determined by the conflicts between
north and south, between core and
periphery as well as the balance of
forces within societies.”
Like it or
not, globalized capitalism is the system
“we are dealingwith today,” Katharine
Nora Farrell points out. “Unregulated
markets can and do generate enormous
damage, human and environmental.But it’s
a poor musician that blames their
instrument. Markets are created by human
societies, relying on norms and customs
established by humans. Sometimes those
norms are consolidated into law,
sometimes not. Rather than say that
markets are all bad or all good, we have
to determine when and how and under what
conditions markets work or do not work.”
The market
economy is not the only game in town. “I
ask my students, ‘what type of economy
has most affected your life,’ and they
say, ‘Oh, we’re a market economy,’”says
Josh Farley. “And I reply, ‘Oh, really?
Your parents charge you for room and
board?’ Your main experience is the core
economy, the economy of reciprocity and
gifting and providing for your close kin
and community, which is totally outside
the market.”
The market
with its emphasis on self-interest, he
continues, is not well-suited to the
social dilemmas that humans currently
face. “If I catch all the fish, I get
all the benefits even if I wipe out
thepopulation and future generations
suffer,” he continues. “If I spew carbon
dioxide into the atmosphere, I get the
benefit while others suffer. Instead of
the invisible hand that Smith talked
about, social dilemmas create an
invisible foot that kicks the common
goodto pieces.”
Moving
toward
Transformation
Many of the
proposed solutions to the climate crisis
are market-driven,such as carbon trading
systems. Some are even predicated on
growth strategies.
"We are
confronting so-called solutions that
are coming to us from the systems
that created the problems in the
first place,” explains Ashish
Kothari. “These are mostly
Band-Aids, such astechno-engineering
solutions or the ‘net zero’ that
most countries have said that they
will achieve in terms of carbon
emissions by 2050 or 2060 or 2070.
These so-called solutions tend to
sustain these structures and even
greenwash them.”
The origin of
many transformative solutions, on the
other hand, come from resistance on the
ground to mining, large-scale
hydroelectric plants, and similar
efforts to generate the electricity and
inputs to sustain economic growth at
unsustainable levels. Kothari recalls
the movement in central India 30 years
ago against two large hydro electric
projects. “We didn’t want these projects
not just because they would displace our
villages and destroy our livelihoods,
but because the river on which these
dams are built is our mother and we
won’t let our mother be shackled by your
dreams of progress,”he says. “You can
see in this resistance movement
alternative ways of being, acting,
dreaming, and relating to each other and
to nature.”
This
alternative way of relating to nature
challenges the anthropocentrism that
lies at the heart of unsustainable
economic growth. “In Western modernity,
there is a divide between humans and
nature,”he continues. “You can see it
even in the way we speak. We don’t say
‘humans and the rest of the nature.’ At
school we learned about a pyramid in
which humans are on top. Actually, there
is a circle of life in which all species
have equality.”
This
different approach to nature, he
continues, can be found “in the
solidarity economy, in movements for
food and energy sovereignty, and among
those fighting for self-determination
like the Zapatistas who say that we will
be the ones who will govern our
communities in ways that are more
equitable and just.”
The challenge
is to inject this kind of thinking into
the efforts to address global
challenges.
"What we
lack–and what ecological economics
is trying to promote—are economic
institutions that preserve, enhance,
and restore the biotic community of
which humans are a part,” Josh
Farley adds. “Over the last 50
years, we have been through a
neoliberal revolution that has taken
everything from the care economy and
the public sector economy and put it
all into the market. We’re now
trying to put the natural resource
base into the market. This is the
wrong approach because of the
physical characteristics of the
resources. We need to flip the
dialog around and start taking
things out of the market economy and
put them into other sectors of the
economy.”
Mechanisms
of
Change
The current
economic system is ill-suited to handle
challenges like climate change and
biodiversity loss. Worse, it is directly
responsible for these problems in the
first place. Alternative sexist, but are
they replicable and scalable?
"While we
have amazing examples of
alternatives around the world, we
need tocreate scale to challenge the
mega-problems,” Ashish Kothari
explains. “We need much greater
horizontal networking among these
amazing initiatives. It’s not about
upscaling but out scaling across
horizontal networks of solidarity,
then creating the critical mass to
affect those larger problems.”
Alternatives
like
the Zapatista struggle, he adds,
“are not replicable. You can’t
copy them in India and make them
successful. But we can learn and
exchange these values and ethics
and principles and create
horizontal solidarity networks
around the world. We can become
more resilient based on the
understanding that there is a
pluriverse ofpolitics,
ideologies, ecologies, and
economies, all of which are
important and worth respecting
in so far as they do not
undermineother ecologies,
ideologies, and so on. These are
expressed in different languages
as swaraj,
ubuntu,
buen vivir, and
so on.”
The role of
cooperation—as opposed to the
competition fostered by markets—will
prove critical in any response to the
climate crisis. “Mainstream economists
argue that humans are inherentlyselfish,
that we always act in our own
self-interest and can’t cooperate, which
is absolutely absurd,” Josh Farley
argues.“Humans are the most cooperative
species ever to evolve. Think about what
you had for breakfast. How many people
were involved ingetting the food to your
plate, between truckers and farmers and
producers of fertilizers and farm
machinery. Think about how manypeople
were involved in developing the
knowledge necessary to do that—agronomy,
metallurgy, geology. The knowledge
required tomeet your basic needs every
day was generated by billions of people
over thousands of years. Humans cannot
live apart from society anybetter than a
cell can live apart from an individual
body.”
Farley sees
culture as the medium through which
cooperative ideas and approaches can
evolve at a rapid pace. “Within a
society, the most selfish individuals
out compete other individuals,” he
notes. “But the most cooperative and
altruistic group out competes other
groups. So, we have dual forces
selecting for self-interested and
cooperative behavior. We need to evolve
to cooperate at larger and larger
scales, at the scale of problems like
climate change.”
Humans pass
on their genes to successive
generations. Bacteria, on the otherhand,
“swap genetic information called
plasmids horizontally,” he continues.
“At times of stress and difficulty, they
do so more quickly. For humans it’s
culture where we swap ideas
horizontally. We’re at a time of crisis.
We need to grab ideas from other
cultures. That’s this pluriverse idea.
There is not one idea; different
cultures and ecosystems need different
solutions.A socially just, sustainable
transition is the goal, and we need to
test all our policies against that goal.
If the policies work toward that goal,
we accept them; if not, we reject them.”
Species
evolution takes multiple generations.
“Cultural evolution can be astonishingly
fast,” Farley adds. “Look at World War
II. The United States went from being a
capitalist economy to a formof state
capitalism very quickly. How many cars
did we produce in Detroit in World War
II for the public? Zero. The government
just took over the industry. We suddenly
rationed everything—food, gasoline—and
people accepted it. We faced a serious
challenge,we stopped focusing on
individual needs and started focusing on
collective needs, and we did this very
fast.”
Ashish
Kothari agrees. “There are elements in
the Green New Deal orsome of the other
programs around the world that we can
encourage,” he says. “Which of these
transitions will lead to systemic
transformations and which ones will
entrench the current system? A shift
from fossil fuel to electric cars only
entrenches the system of inequality
between north and south. But if we’re
talking about a transition from private
cars to public transportation, that
would lead toward a more transformative
system. A transition also has to move
toward radical forms of democracy or
self-determination (swarajor ubuntu). It
has to move toward economic democracy,
worker control, cooperatives, and a
social economy that does not use GDP as
yard stick of progress.”
Kothari
points to a number of examples of local
initiatives that move in this direction,
including forms of agriculture that
don’t require much in the way of
external energy inputs. “There are
5,000Dalit women farmers in south India
who are growing not just enough for
their families but also enough to
participate in the local market and
provide food relief to others during
COVID,” he relates. “They’re doing this
with dryland farming, completely
rain-fed, with their own seeds and no
external inputs. They’re relying
entirely on their own knowledge and
labor.”
Another
example comes from the Ladakh region of
India. “We have two models there,” he
continues. “One is mega solar built by
corporations, and the other is
decentralized passive and active solar.
Ladakh has over 300 days of sunlight in
a year. By constructing buildings with a
blend of traditional and newtechnology,
you can trap the sunlight during the day
and it warms you without artificial
heating even when its minus 20 degrees
at night.”
Farley
similarly identifies the commons as a
key element of any sociallyjust
transition. That includes a “Green
knowledge commons,” which shares
knowledge transnationally, as well as a
social media commons where the
algorithms encourage people to focus on
ecological limits and social justice
rather than on buying more stuff and
thepolarizing images and language that
facilitate that commerce. And it would
include an atmospheric commons that
asserts that no one ownsthe atmosphere.
Dorothy
Guerrero puts ownership at the top of
the list of factors toconsider. “Any
conversation that doesn’t put
nationalization on the table would mean
leaving the terms of transition to
fossil fuel executives,” she notes.
“Acknowledging
that we can’t do this transition
overnight, we have to discuss what we do
with existing fossil fuel? First, we
take control of it. If states don’t own
the special events resources, they can’t
control them or design a program of
transition involving them. I don’t
disregard totally the small,the
independent, because they have roles to
play. But when you talk about
transition, it has to be at a certain
scale, at a nationallevel, and there
should be national ownership. Yes, small
is beautiful but big is beautiful too
because that is how we control
geopolitics”
Nationalization
implies
a focus on the national or state level.
“I often saythat one weakness of the
left is that we’re so good at being in
opposition, but it is so difficult when
it comes to us governing,”notes
Guerrero. “There are many discussions in
Latin America now with Colombia,
Bolivia, Chile and hopefully Brazil:
will it be the pink tide again and will
there be more red in the pink? What were
the economic problems that weren’t
addressed before?Politically it was a
success. But even the radical
governments didn’t make very radical
changes in the economic realm, because
they werealso scared of being
crushed—and they would be crushed by the
United States not wanting them to
succeed.”
National
control applies equally to renewable
energy. “We have to askwhat this energy
is for,” she says. “We need to clarify
who will build it up, where and for what
purpose. There is also athreat that
fossil fuel companies are portraying
themselves as key players in renewable
energy buildup but they are not actually
investing in the development of
renewable energy.” Meanwhile, the
countries that are already investing in
the infrastructure of renewable energy
will control this technology through
patent protections. “This debate will
determine which countries willdominate
and which countries will be excluded,”
she continues. “The United States,
China, and Germany are competing to see
whowill dominate the renewable energy
sector. But Haiti and Bangladesh won’t
be players.”
For climate
justice movements and those pushing
against fossil fuels, “we need to
increase solidarity with
mineral-producing countries,” she
continues. “OPEC is a an important
example that we need tolook at. At the
same time, we have to avoid weakening
the labor movements in those countries.
We need solidarity in both political and
economic terms. During a transition,
someone will pay, and it’s usually those
without voice or bargaining power.”
Implementing
change at a local, national, and global
level will not be easy. Forone, powerful
forces benefit from the current status
quo. “It’s not enough to wish and work
for alternatives but to be aware that
thestronger the alternatives, the
greater the forces against them,”
Dorothy Guerrero warns.
Another
challenge is the time frame. Serious
decarbonization should have started
decades ago. “If scientists tell us that
we have only 10 years left to reverse
the climate crisis, we can’t
transformthe situation in 10 years,”
says Kothari. “We’re talking about a
multigenerational transformation. We
‘redealing with structural forces that
have been around in some cases for
thousands of years like patriarchy or
hundreds of years likecapitalism. To say
that we need to do this in a single
generation is unrealistic.”
Truth
and
Reconciliation
When
Pope
Francis visited the Nunavit
region of Canada this summer,
heapologized to the indigenous
community for the role played by
the Catholic Church in Europe’s
colonization of the country and
the forced assimilation of
native peoples. Some responded
that that apology has not been
matched by
action. But
in Manitoba, the Pope received a
very visible token ofappreciation:
a headdress that
he wore during the event.
"This
stunning image of Pope Francis
wearing an indigenous headdress
placedon his head by the
representatives of a consortium of
indigenous chiefs of Canada was a
ritualistic act and very symbolic,”
says Katharine Nora Farrell. “We
have to deal with reconciliation and
peace and apology, as well as
embarrassment and shame for all the
horrible things that have been
done.”
"It’s not
just about the pope but about these
incredible indigenous leaders,” she
continues. “They’re saying, ‘You
came here in good faith to apologize
and we’re not going to ruby our face
in it. Instead, we’re going to say
you’re just like us and we’re going
to do this in the most majestic and
symbolic way by giving you this
headdress. You can’t wear this
headdress unless you have earned it.
By placing it on his head, theysaid
that he had earned their respect.”
The crimes of
colonialism and forced assimilation also
have had anecological dimension since
the land of indigenous peoples was often
stolen for precisely the kind of
polluting industry responsible forthe
huge uptick in carbon emissions during
the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, the
Global North bears the lion’s share of
the responsibility for all the carbon
emissions currently in the atmosphere.
"Climate
reparations are at the center of the
climate justice struggle,”Dorothy
Guerrero says. “We need to highlight
the need to create historically
informed approaches that confront
colonialism and imperialism and the
climate crisis simultaneously.
That’s gaining traction in the UK
among young people who see the role
of the UK in extracting resources
from countries and impoverishing
those countries by doing so.”
Such
reparations can be understood as not
only an apology for past actionsbut also
a concrete effort to repair the harm
done. What the Pope attempted in Canada
is taking a different form in Colombia
where Gustavo Petro and Francia Marquez
recently took over as leaders. “Marquez,
the vice president, is the winner of
Goldman Environmental Prize,” Farrell
says, referring to a picture of Marquez.
“She’s angry in this photo and she’s
right to be angry. And the people of the
Choco region, with a large
Afro-Colombian population, are also
right to be angry. It’s amega-biodiverse
region with a lot of violence inhabited
mostly by poor people. Marquez appealed
to these voters in the last days of the
election and many people think that’s
what swung the election. She said, ‘if
you’re a nobody, vote for me, because
I’m a nobody. This will be a government
of the nobodies.’ She and Petro have put
together an incredible coalition of
individuals in the new government with
plans to introduce agricultural tax
reform and manage the resource economy.”
"We
need to recognize that economic
processes are
anthropogenic,”Farrell
continues. “We have to link
ecological economics to moral
theories connected to questions
of responsibility. “These issues
motivate activists to get
involved. Look at the
indignation in Greta Thunberg’s
arguments. Someone has to answer
for what has happened. Only then
we can get involved in fixing
it. The damage done has been
brutal. Until we as a global
community comprehend this great
tragedy, I don’t think we’ll
able to pick and move beyond
this.”
