How best can we reconcile a core American commitment to economic growth with a finite planet and all but insatiable craving? As a progressive Buddhist, one who is intimately familiar with the Limits to Growth, I feel challenged to take a coherent position that reconciles sustainability, growth, and craving.
GOP anti-American obstruction notwithstanding, we have had GNP growth as a metric for how we’re doing economically: less than three percent real growth is a problem. Five percent or more is great. It has been a political crisis in recent years that we have not met those goals. That employment needs to grow with the population is another core assumption, again despite GOP unwillingness to take effective action on that score. But taking more and more of the Earth’s past, present, and future for ourselves cannot continue indefinitely.
That we live on a finite planet is not in doubt. That we will reach its limits with anything but a catastrophe is, however, very much in doubt. We as a species use about half the land area for homes, businesses, roads, farms, mines, logging, and ranching. We strip-mine the sea with our drag nets. We use fossil fuels and other non-renewable resources at an infinitely faster rate than they regenerate. The Limits to Growth studies made assumptions about total available reserves that did not account for potential reserves and the disincentive to know about more than 25 years of proven reserves due to the resulting depression of prices. Still, adding more non-renewable resources to the model just delays, not averts, the day we have to stop relying on them. What is the sustainable capacity for humans on Earth? That depends on the time scale for sustainability. If we’re talking about the lifetimes of anyone now alive, we can probably sustain what we have more or less. On the scale of millennia, however, it is not possible to continue our geometric growth.
It is intrinsically and perennially human to crave what we do not have, whether a better past or a hoped-for future. Modernity has turned that craving into an elaborate social and political matrix that in the West and the Pacific Rim is, in political science terms, social democracy coupled with oligarchic plutocracy. I am not confident that our democratic or plutocratic institutions could handle a truly sustainable world. We are a violent species, and even the world’s unquestionably strongest and richest nation, a self-styled paragon of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, is so insecure that it bullies its enemies as well as its friends. I fear that as positive-sum materialist growth turns to zero-sum or negative-sum, we will turn on each other and within decades devolve to a tiny fraction of our current population as hunter/gatherers and rudimentary agriculturalists. I have seen advocacy for Zero Population Growth - but none for Zero Economic Growth, except For (Brown and Yellow) Others.
It's taken three decades for riches-just-for-the rich politics to be noticed and surfaced as a mainstream problem, the generation-long class war of the rich vs. the rest, in a nominally positive-sum environment. How would this play out in a zero-sum or negative-sum milieu?
How do we as Buddhists reconcile global craving and its attendant suffering with the Modern Growth Gospel? How can we as progressives reconcile perpetual growth with its limits? How may we as humans reconcile our craving and violence with our desire to leave a better world - or any world at all - to our descendents and heirs?