A behemoth that won’t stop growing

by David Suzuki

Have you noticed that we describe the market and economy as if they were living entities? The market is showing signs of stress. The economy is healthy. The economy is on life support.

Sometimes, we act as if the economy is larger than life. In the past, people trembled in fear of dragons, demons, gods, and monsters, sacrificing anything — virgins, money, newborn babies — to appease them. We know now that those fears were superstitious imaginings, but we have replaced them with a new behemoth: The economy.

Even stranger, economists believe this behemoth can grow forever. Indeed, the measure of how well a government or corporation is doing is its record of economic growth. But our home — the biosphere, or zone of air, water, and land where all life exists — is finite and fixed. It can’t grow. And nothing within such a world can grow indefinitely. In focusing on constant growth, we fail to ask the important questions. What is an economy for? Am I happier with all this stuff? How much is enough?

A timely new book by York University environmental economist Peter Victor, Managing Without Growth: Slower by Design, Not Disaster, addresses the absurdity of an economic system based on endless growth. Victor also shows that the concept of growth as an indispensable feature of economics is a recent phenomenon.

The economy is not a force of nature, some kind of immutable, infallible entity. We created it, and when cracks appear, it makes no sense to simply shovel on more money to keep it going. Because it’s a human invention, an economy is something we should be able to fix — but if we can’t, we should toss it out and replace it with something better.

This current economic crisis provides an opportunity to re-examine our priorities. For decades, scientists and environmentalists have been alarmed at global environmental degradation.

For the first time in four billion years of life on Earth, one species has become so powerful and plentiful that it is altering the physical, chemical, and biological features of the planet on a geological scale. And so we have to ask, “What is the collective impact of everyone in the world?” We’ve never had to do that before, and it’s difficult. Even when we do contemplate our global effects, we have no mechanism to respond as one species to the crises.

So all the things an intact ecosystem does to keep the planet vibrant and healthy for animals like us are simply ignored in our economy. No wonder futurist Hazel Henderson describes conventional economics as “a form of brain damage.”

Nature’s services keep the planet habitable for animals like us and must become an integral component of a new economic structure. We must get off this suicidal focus on endless, mindless growth.

Take David Suzuki’s Nature Challenge and learn more at www.davidsuzuki.org.

Dr. David T. Suzuki is a Vancouver-based  award-winning scientist, environmentalist and broadcast

http://www.metronews.ca/vancouver/live/article/145054