In the Urgent Search of a No Growth Economy

In the Urgent Search of a No Growth Economy
We are quickly coming to the limits of an habitable world on this planet Earth. It is hubris of the worst kind to believe that economies can grow without end. The limits of human culture are quickly coming, not necessarily in my lifetime or of the lifetime of any living human but in the imaginable future of a few generations, straining our ability to respond to the inertia of the arc of our future.
Even that slight remoteness gives us confidence that ‘it’s not my problem’. It was easy to believe in the limitlessness of the physical world, Earth, when the edge of that world was known only by the endurance of humanity to travel and return. Maps of the known had fuzzy edges with territory to be discovered that lay beyond and beyond the celestial dome was where God lived. Now we have images of a remarkably small rocky planet with a veneer of gas and water covering its surface against the vast black vacuum.
Great societies have grown and declined. It seems that this character of human communities is fundamental. That is not the fear. This is the charter of human culture and the result of living in a world and on a planet that changes. Some times the declines of societies are due in part to the exhaustions of the local environments as well as the cyclic nature of societies. They could move on to the next place. This time human culture, the world of human activity, has filled the planets environment to capacity. We must learn to live within an absolute physical limit of the planet to support us.
By the estimates of some, the habits of those of us who live in these United States can not be extended to the whole of humanity on the limited resources of this planet. For us in the ‘first world’ the task of sustaining human culture will require giving up the affluence in the way we have become accustom and redefining ‘quality of life’ in a way that can be supported by and for all of humanity. Peace and social justice issues will seem as a quaint aside when the world is quarrelling over food and water in a global ecosystem that is contracting. We must find new ways of living that satisfies our individual and collective egos that do not require economies and populations to grow without end and that regards the global environment as destructible.