Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
An enclosure is no less than right to amorality, freed from the ancient obligations of the common. It follows that our task is to evacuate enclosures and reclaim the common.
Copiously, ludicrously, we deface our lands, displace our brother hawks and sister mice, and destroy our links to the ecological communities that fabric our very being. Life is consumption, and, I suppose, consumption is life. But we have strayed so far from whence we came.
Although certainly embraced more frequently and ardently by liberals than by what passes for a conservative today, Wendell Berry is clearly a religious rather than Liberal thinker, praising the unified and relentless in his criticism of the fragmented.
As resources become scarce, A New Reality uses a pattern seen in nature – decelerating growth in the second part of the Sigmoid Curve – to display a shift that must happen in order for human kind to survive, referred to as Epoch B. In Epoch B, people recognize the limited nature of resources and human values adjust toward equilibrium, balance and consensus – interdependence.
This first in our series of briefing papers on building An Economy That Works explores the underlying phenomenon of ‘secular stagnation’ – a long-term decline in the rate of growth of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
The Ancient Romans never understood what hit them. Nor did later historians: there exist literally hundreds of theories on what caused the fall of the Roman Empire.
Around 11,000 years ago, as the last ice age ended, our ancestors – in no fewer than 5 locations around the world – took advantage of the new conditions and tried an agricultural way of life. Fast forward through two momentous phase shifts in human history (agricultural and industrial revolutions), and here we are: approaching 8 billion, seeking freedom, experiences, and material wealth all derived from physical surplus.
There is, of course, a caution for our species in Pig #6707. When an organism grows beyond its design, nature will determine it to fail — a fact of life, in the strictest sense. Nowhere in evolutionary theory is hypertrophic growth posited as the key to success. What is key is optimum size, what we’d more accurately call right size.
We are living in extraordinary times and transformation is already happening and accelerating all around us. Many technological, social, and environmental changes are racing up the steep end of the exponential curve. I
If we truly want to increase equality, then, it will have to be created at a sustainable level, and thus ones much lower than that enjoyed by the rich, middle-classes, and even workers of advanced industrial nations alike. We may choose to fight inequality by way of strikes, wage increases, and taxation, but that will not return us to a golden age; it will hasten our rendezvous with economics in the age of resource exhaustion and mounting clean-up costs.
The end of growth has been postponed as long as is humanly possible. It’s far past time to come to terms with ecological reality and make a deliberate transition to a post-growth regime.
Ecomodernism is the idea that we can harness technology to decouple society from the natural world. For these techno-optimists, to reject the promise of GMOs, nuclear, and geo-engineering is to be hopelessly romantic, anti-modern, and even misanthropic. An ecological future, for them, is about cranking up the gears of modernity and rejecting a politics of limits.
