GrowMore

I’m a fan of Monty Don and his gardening advice and he is of course a strictly organic man. One of the things he talks about is that apart from the environmental reasons to not use fertilizers and pesticides etc is that you should not unnaturally force a plant to grow faster or bigger than it would normally as it will make it weak and less resilient to pests and weather shocks. This seems sage advice and it’s maybe something Mr Darling should take a lesson from in terms of his force-feeding our economy on a high-debt, high-grow diet.

Mr Darling is – with most politicians and ‘autistic-school economists’ – fixated on growth for growth’s sake. If he were a gardener he would be liberally dosing his land with GrowMore fertilizer and all kinds of toxic chemical pesticides. This would kill his soil and all the natural predators of ‘pests’ and make his plants far less resilient. Resilience is one thing we badly need to build into our society, culture and infrastructure if we are going to ride the Perfect Storm we describe in Citizen Renaissance.

The myopia of our current politicians has us firmly stuck in an economic whirlwind which destroys all around it. The rational goes something like this. Economic growth is the paradigm we are in. Why question it (unless you recognise its negative effects as we show in the book). The theory is that new technology brings efficiencies of production which utilises inputs of resources and labour more efficiently. But this displaces labour (most often these days unskilled labour). Displaced labour is a danger to politics as they tend not to vote for you and also can’t buy products and so reduce consumption and growth. So we need more consumption from those left with jobs to create growth to create new jobs and industries. Hence the jolly wheeze of tempting us back into the shops for Xmas with tax cuts (to be paid back by us later).

It is estimated the US economy needs to grow at 3-5% just to stop unemployment from rising. Unfortunately people don’t have insatiable needs (an annoying disagreement with neo-classical economic theory) so we need a huge industry to keep creating desires and wants – called advertising and mass-media. This advertising created consumption fixation merely locks us in to the ultimate lie that extrinsic-values satisfaction will make us happy. As all the stuff we consume does not satisfy our spiritual needs we keep consuming more and more hoping the next fix of our addiction will do the job. So it’s growth for growth’s sake. Not with any philosophical endpoint of seeking ‘good lives’ for all. Just to keep the machine going. What a dull old job politicians have given themselves. Surely a not so sophisticated computer could replace them all if that was all we wanted from politics? Clearly someone needs to pull the power on this crazy merry-go-round and think again with some vision about how we attain ‘good lives’ for all within the carrying capacity of the planet?

This is an impoverished political-economics for lazy politicians without the guts or vision to see things could be different. This merry-go-round locks us into unsustainable growth, rips the heart even faster out of what remains of our delicate planet’s life-support-machine and reduces us to passive consumers locked onto a hedonic treadmill and ever more alienated from each other and our own selves

As a friend of mine, the bard Alastair McIntosh, recently on BBC Scotland’s Thought for the Day – “Both the economic bubble now bursting and global warming have one driver in common: consumerism. Our conundrum is that we need more consumption to save the economy, but less to save the planet. Spending our way out of a recession is therefore only a stop-gap measure. It’s methadone for our planetary heroin addiction. We simply feed the habit if we think that today’s problems can be tackled at conventional political, technical or economic levels. If we’re redefining our “central mission”, we must press further. Technical fixes are certainly part of the solution. But I’d put it to you that the deep work must be this: to learn to live more abundantly with less, to rekindle community, and to serve fundamental human need instead of worshiping at the altars of greed. The crisis of these times is therefore spiritual. It calls for reconnecting our inner lives with the outer world – an expansion of consciousness. And that’s an opportunity that we neglect at our peril, for as I once heard an old Quaker woman say, ‘It is perilous, to neglect one’s spiritual life.’”

However as Professor Peter Victor shows a country can deliver on all the Wellbeing objectives it could possibly have AND have a Slowgrow or steady-state, no-grow economy.

We live in extraordinary times. Dangerous times but also a time at which business-as-usual is not an option. What Winston Churchill said in 1936 is true today “The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences.” Growth-fixation is the ultimate baffling expedient. We have just one planet but live in the UK as if we have three and the US as if we have five. When we know how small the cake really is it’s time to face up and fess up to the reality that we can’t keep growing. So lets stop kidding and soothing  ourselves. Lets dare to dream and plan for a different future. But for this to happen we desperately need a new type of leader. Not bean counters and party-political spinners and tacticians, but visionaries up to the job.