Growth

Growth

Environmentalists and economists view the natural landscape differently. One sees it as something to be turned into saleable goods (grain, timber, furs, building lots), one sees it as something good in itself, connected to other ecosystems, and maintaining a growing, cyclical or simply varying state of biological production. Their differences are for the most part irreconcilable, despite recent attempts, over the last two or three decades, to place a dollar value on the work of nature. Farmland, a necessary use for most civilizations, provides a good example. In a growing agricultural society farmland, partly because of its extent, changes the natural environment considerably, reducing some species, increasing others, changing the state of water courses, changing farmed soils. Such changes in the natural landscape can be minimized, farmed soils conserved or improved, nutrients kept on the farm (and out of rivers and lakes), and some of the natural biota maintained, by using regenerative agricultural practices and giving nature room to work (that is, leaving large parts of the landscape unfarmed). The natural productivity of the ecosystem, and the work it does, will be reduced, some parts of it eliminated. For instance, large predatory animals (wolves, mountain lions) rarely survive in agricultural regions, partly because they compete with humans by eating domestic animals, partly because their prey animals (deer, moose, beaver) are too few for them to maintain viable populations. The connections among patches of suitable habitat are too few. But if agricultural practice is enlightened and takes into account the needs of the natural world (rarely the case now because regenerative practices are seen as limiting profits) and limits itself to a proportion of the landscape (say, 60-70% of any ecosystem, which is seen as limiting real estate profits), both the natural world and the agricultural/industrial society can survive.

In a capitalist world, land tries to maximize its value. So farmland is over fertilized to grow more crops, polluting ground water and waterways, and takes over as much of the landscape as it can. River floodplains, with their connected swampland—land eminently useful as natural habitat but of no value in a capitalist economy—tries to become dry, saleable land. Controlling a river with dams and levees creates new dry land in the river’s floodplain; and also hydroelectricity; water for drinking, irrigation and industry; a mode of transportation. The amount spent on controlling the river, which continues for as long as the riverworks are maintained, raises the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Of all these uses, hydroelectricity is the only one that comes close to paying the costs of river development, which is—in terms of costs and benefits—a loss funded by the state, whose benefits such as transportation and water supply could have been provided otherwise, if one ignores the value of the newly created dry land (its value growing daily as farmland becomes factory or subdivision). River development is a windfall to riverside landowners and land speculators, whose profits also add to the GDP. What are lost are the fisheries the river provided, the timber and collectable mushrooms, the habitat for migratory birds, for fur bearing and game animals, for spawning fish, the work of the floodplain in storing and cleaning water, in controlling flooding downstream, in removing nutrients (and using them to grow fish, animals and trees), in regulating the pulse of fresh water to the marine estuary to which the river flows, and to which the spawning fish of the estuary (many of them commercial species) are adapted: the whole seasonal background of human life. These values require no human input and the most valuable of them (nutrient removal, flood control) are not counted as part of the GDP. Income—from harvested fish, recreational hunting and fishing, harvested timber—count in the GDP. Adding things up, the additional cost of purifying water by communities all along the river, of flood control, of lost fisheries and timber, of collectable mushrooms, of recreational use, of lost marine fisheries often exceeds the value of the hydroelectricity, the production of floodplain farmlands, the navigational use. In some streams the loss becomes clear and dams are removed. In rivers with great hydroelectric potential like the Columbia, development is probably profitable on a cost-benefit analysis, though even there, a healthy salmon fishery would, at current prices for fish (and the increased value of recreational fishing), rival the value of the power. Without the dams the whole pattern of settlement along the river and its industrial evolution would have been different. (No aluminum industry, for instance, and thus no manufacturer of aircraft like Boeing.) Nowadays the power could be generated by solar thermal collectors in the deserts west of the Cascades, or by photo-voltaic panels on roofs of houses, parking lots and warehouses anywhere in the Columbia valley. With solar systems, the power from water stored behind dams provides a useful backup for when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind blow; but less water is required and the dams have more flexibility of operation—they can make more concessions to the needs of fish. On the other hand, power from dams in flatland streams (the Mississippi valley, the lower Amazon basin) doesn’t pay the costs of construction and maintenance. Such dams require more land per watt than photo-voltaic collectors (often criticized for the land they take up). Half the power reservoirs in the Amazon emit more carbon to the atmosphere in the form of methane from decaying vegetation left in the reservoir during construction, or growing and dying in it, and washed into it from above, than a coal-burning power plant producing the same amount of electricity.

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The push for development comes partly from population growth: more people need more farms, more land to be turned into saleable real estate. The idea of living within nature has not applied to human settlement in any serious way since the adoptions of agriculture 7-10,000 years ago. (All this time I am sure some people mourned the end of fish runs, of migrations of gazelles, of great trees—for instance, of the cedars of Lebanon, their wood prized by the Egyptians for its durability and sweet smell.) Agricultural peoples carved out their niche from nature: fields from forests, irrigated fields from deserts, floodplain fields from diked rivers. Forests provided wood for brickyards, iron foundries, buildings, ships, cookfires; rivers provided water and power and took away waste. The corn that could be grown on a floodplain field in the Middle West was marketable and edible, more desirable than a hatful of wild mushrooms or a dozen muskrat pelts.

Much of the problem with modern human settlement patterns is their extent. Temperate forest recovers rapidly from logging (full recovery can take 300-2000 years, depending on the forest—redwoods take the longest) and the berries and shrubs that colonize the bare ground make habitat for the animals of the edge. So a watershed’s forests could be logged on a long rotation (300-500 years in the eastern United States, 150 in some environments), with some areas (steep slopes, stream edges out 100 feet) left uncut, or cut more lightly (light, infrequent selective cuts). Such cutting would preserve the different ages of forest habitat in the watershed (old growth, edge, young forest) and the mix of tolerant and intolerant, deciduous and coniferous, trees; minimize loss of nutrients and water; protect fisheries and streams (and thus the land downstream). Such forests would be managed for their place in the water cycle and as habitat for their plants and animals as well as for their marketable timber. How can this be done? The timber after 50 or 80 years is too valuable, the time too long, the need to make a mark on the land too great.

Capitalism has successfully harnessed human greed, which is unstoppable. People build up to the banks of rivers or the shores of the sea and are driven out in floods, and expect the government to correct the problem. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries milldams were built every few hundred yards on northeastern rivers (low dams, often passable by fish), turning them into a series of ponds. The edges of the ponds silted in from erosion from agriculture in the watershed and the dams were finally abandoned for steam or electrical power. The freed rivers downcut through the silt to form single channel streams, unconnected with their former floodplains and wetlands: a loss no one foresaw. Homemade levees at the mouths of small salmon streams in the Pacific Northwest destroy the nursery habitat for the fish but carve out a few flat acres for a homestead. The millions of acres of the Mississippi valley that were drained and developed under the nineteenth century Swampland Act would be immensely valuable today in maintaining the flow and fisheries of the river, and in reducing the nutrients that reach the Gulf. The need to grow—the existence of land that could potentially be used—made preserving them impossible. The Progressive Movement of the early twentieth century rationalized such use as turning the environment to maximum human benefit (to provide the greatest good for the greatest number, a Benthamian proposition). Farmers living near rail lines who sued railroads for the fires that resulted from the sparks flying from locomotive smokestacks that burned down their haystacks and barns found a similar rationale less benevolent. They invariably lost their suits—progress, in the form of railroads, was regarded as the greater good. Perhaps this argument started to weaken with the regulation of contaminants in food and drugs under Teddy Roosevelt.

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Our current effect on the environment (especially the changing climate) forces us to look at nature as a good in itself, not as something to be manipulated for human use. But how can we live in nature? We haven’t done it since people lived among the great herds of animals in the Pleistocene. That way of life lasted tens of thousands of years; and hunting peoples regularly burned forests and grasslands, hunted some animals to extinction, ditched swamps to favor certain trees or fish, affected the evolution of herbivores. The effect of people on the natural world runs along a continuum. Geographers use ways to measure it, such as energy use per capita (the more, the more the environmental impact), the size of the American corn crop (the greater the crop, the greater the effect on farmland, rivers, estuaries), the rate of growth of population, or of economic output; the land required to support each person (the ‘ecological footprint’). Technological development is not necessary for the destruction of an environment or the collapse of the population that depends on it. A rise in population of microbes, sheep or people beyond the carrying capacity of their environments will do that, though the long term damage to the environment is likely (but not necessarily) less than that of a technologically advanced civilization with its mines, waste dumps, ubiquitous chemical contamination. (The banned industrial chemicals released by melting glaciers are once again accumulating in Swiss alpine lakes.) An agricultural population that puts too much pressure on its soils can collapse as easily as a technologically advanced one that overwhelms many natural systems at once.

A focus on nature is totally new for us; it means giving nature room to work. Modern people can consolidate their lives into linear cities, and recycle their biological and manufactured wastes into resources, but the natural world needs room to work: 40% of any ecosystem left to itself was Eugene Odum’s estimate, not a bad one. Letting nature work means the end of expansive growth. It means halving the size of the American corn crop, as a quarter of cornland goes into hayfields and another quarter into annual grasses like rye and wheat. Crop rotation reduces the need for fertilizer and pesticides, greatly reduces soil erosion and helps control runoff of nutrients and pesticides into streams. A focus on nature means putting enough land, farmland or suburbs, into unused (or lightly used) habitat to reduce the runoff of soil, water and nutrients into streams to something near aboriginal levels (that 40% of the landscape in natural habitat, some of which can be in one’s back yard). It means recreating riverside wetlands and connecting separated natural habitats so plants and animals can move around us. It means reducing energy use in the US by 75-90% and keeping carbon emissions per person to a fraction of what they are now. It means opening up streamside wetlands (buying farmland, moving houses) so rivers can flood and fish can spawn. It means moving permanent structures back from the river or the beach (at least 20-30 feet above flood level or mean high tide; beyond the surges of storms or hurricanes) and being ready to move riverbank and coastal settlements back further as the sea rises (7 feet by 2100 is a reasonable planning figure). It means banning hormone-mimicking chemicals that accumulate in animals, plants and people; controlling the use of heavy metals like lead and mercury; and phasing out the industrial chemistry of chlorine. It means falling human populations, at least until their footprints match their environments. It means a more egalitarian world, less third world poverty, more women with control over their lives

Little of this seems likely, some, such as drinkable rivers, is probably impossible. Wars over resources, over Australian iron ore or North American water, are much more likely our future.

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For the last few hundred years westerners have lived with the idea of progress. In the west, progress in understanding the world (a scientific outlook) became part of controlling and exploiting it (a capitalist impulse? this was less so, say, in China) and coincided with the west’s beginning to dominate the rest of the planet. As agricultural practices improved and industrialization revolutionized the production of soil nutrients and the transportation of crops, people ate more, and as public health measures (such as vaccination and better sewage disposal) improved human health, progress in ‘scientific’ understanding coincided with a tremendous growth in human population. Growth and progress were intertwined. Progress meant growth, in population, land area, military power, personal income. The idea of progress replaced the notion that human societies are cyclical: that societies rise and fall, like the prosperity of the individual, while the human heart remains the same. We think of moderns as rising above racism, sexism and homophobia and while there is a progressive strain in modern western thought, other strains, usually associated with fundamentalist interpretations of the traditional near-eastern religions of the west, are quite reactionary; and despite the tremendous sentimental streak in western culture (a product of our wealth, that insulates us from biological realities), we seem as capable of cruelty to each other as any Assyrian or Roman. But progress in understanding the earth, or in human relations, and growth are not the same; and a society can advance in understanding of the world and not (or not necessarily) grow in overall income; for instance, it might use new knowledge to modify its environmental impact. The idea of the usefulness of science is very old—think of Ariadne showing Theseus how to escape from the Minotaur’s cave—and I am not arguing against it. ‘Progress’ in the future may mean a different, perhaps ’better,’ more comfortable life with less use of natural space or of materials; some say for more people, some for fewer. (But aren’t we comfortable enough, when we must schedule exercise at the gym?) ‘Better’ is a normative word and depends on point of view. I fail to see the advantage, except militarily, of more people—one or one-and-a-half billion are enough. I would prefer some jungle with tigers to remain and some old deciduous forest with elk and wolves, out beyond the suburban edge. While the human heart remains mysterious, the end of growth is not the end of rational thought. Still, it raises some practical problems.

These are being faced by declining industrial cities in the American Middle West. The Middle West has been losing jobs for decades as industrial production becomes more efficient or moves to lower cost labor markets. As people leave and housing deteriorates, neighborhoods fall apart. Some cities attempt to consolidate neighborhoods, some of which remain viable, in order to maintain services (water, roads, police, sewers) which otherwise become unaffordable. Ideally, many abandoned neighborhoods would become parkland, their houses dis-assembled, the lumber and metals in them sold, their roof shingles and wallboard recycled, their foundations crushed and filled in. The parks would be planted with native, or more or less native species (perhaps, with an eye on the future, those from 300-500 miles to the south), and so be more or less self-maintaining—not Mr. Olmstead’s charming vistas of green slopes and groves, whose meadows require constant input. Neighborhood associations could maintain playing fields fertilized with urban composts provided by the city. Double or triple size lots would have vegetable gardens and orchards. Geese or sheep would mow the Olmsteadian meadows, the availability of the grass the shepherd’s payment. Such parks, if well designed, let nature back into the city, reclaim natural habitat, let people inhabit the more geographically desirable areas (such as breezy ridgelines), and protect aquifer recharge areas and streams. Decline is turned into something positive, letting cities adapt themselves to the landscape in a way the pressures of development (that is, shortsighted profit taking and greed) prevented when they were growing. The hopefulness of this sort of consolidation may be difficult to grasp amidst an ideology that growth is good. It requires accepting the place demanded by nature and some unpleasant realities. Such matters were not grasped after the destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. Much (probably most) of New Orleans is indefensible in the modern world. Relative sea level has risen three feet in southern Louisiana in the last century, a product of rising seas and the subsidence of delta muds. The muds subside from their own weight, from being starved of annual replenishment in floods by dams and levees, and from slow collapse caused by the pumping out of underground oil and water. That is, the subsidence is largely manmade and could be slowed, but at a cost in lost real estate and in oil company profits. Low-lying areas in New Orleans that flooded once will flood again. Such areas should be turned into parks and their inhabitants (largely poor and black) offered a stake on higher ground, financed by a tax on those who benefit from the subsidence. But doing something like this requires accepting that some things can’t be fixed—that a rising sea on a sinking coast can’t be held back—with a disastrous racial twist in the United States. The whole management of the Mississippi Delta and of low-lying coasts everywhere is a disaster. The mangroves, marshes and coral reefs of sea coasts are important for coastal protection and marine fisheries. Coastal areas should not have permanent structures within the reach of high tides or storm surges but—rich or poor—everywhere in the world they do. In general, planning for a rise in sea level of seven feet by 2100 is a reasonable goal for coastal development, but much more in southern Louisiana because of accelerated subsidence caused by the erosive power (eroding the delta marshes) of the rising seas.

An economy that does not grow supporting a population that does is not a good thing, though the current American economy could probably support a billion people with a comfortable standard of living: an adequate diet, education, warmed or cooled houses, running water, transportation, communication, medical care, a room of one’s own. Income would be radically redistributed. What environmentalists want is not necessarily an economy that doesn’t grow in income but one that doesn’t grow in materials use or in the use of space—so one in which the wastes of one process become the resources of another; the natural world is not assaulted with bioaccumulating chemicals; and nature is left room to work. The process of getting more from less is probably self-limiting, and always requires energy, but who can tell—that is a matter of human ingenuity.

While nature, and the growing of fresh food, require space, industrial production and human housing don’t require much of it. Unfortunately, both settlement and industry are usually located in the wrong places, along coasts, on river banks, on major estuaries. Photo-voltaic panels and ground source heat pumps set certain lower limits (both require more space than oil fired burners or fossil fuelled power plants). A world that produces its food without harmful chemicals, without eroding its soils, or degrading its streams or rivers (a so-called regenerative agriculture) and leaves half the landscape alone for nature to work, is probably already at its limits of population. In much of South Asia, Europe and coastal North America, the print of human settlement is too large for the natural world to function properly.

A population that is falling should be able to manage a falling economy. The initial period is difficult because of the increased proportion of old people. This can be partly managed by letting people work longer, partly by better preparing young people (abandoning fewer of them to poverty and prison), partly by a universal military draft with an option to do other work. Many growing economies depend on growth to raise the income of the poorer parts of the population. A shrinking or steady state economy would have to redistribute income to maintain some sense of fairness, and popular support. Egalitarianism has its advantages. The less the gap between rich and poor in a society, the better the quality of life for the average person. To an extent, quality of life is determined less by income itself than by income equality. Thus children from the highest social group, the richest 20%, in (richer) England and Wales are more likely to die than those in the lowest social group (the poorest 20%) in poorer, more egalitarian Sweden. Similarly, wealthy English schoolchildren have poorer test scores than wealthy Finnish children—though better than poor Finnish children. At any rate, an economy that shrinks in accordance with its population should be able (more or less) to maintain its level of personal income.

Whatever that means. Beyond an (easily reachable) point, human happiness and wellbeing have little to do with income. Human needs are few, wants infinite. Most of what we buy and expect is culturally determined. American houses in 2008 are more than twice the size of those 50 years ago, while families are smaller. Western societies in the 1960s used a fraction of the energy of today (one-seventh of today in France and Japan) and were ‘modern.’ We buy to meet our cultural expectations, to soothe our anxieties or to impress or neighbors, less than to satisfy our material needs or provide for our comfort. (‘Comfort’ in terms of modern levels of heat, living space, running hot water and personal hygiene arrived for the mass of people in the 1950s.) Our public priorities suffer from the same lack of perspective. Much of the money the US spends on its armed forces could be spent elsewhere, and the soldiers, many of whom sign up because of lack of economic opportunity in their towns, employed in doing something socially useful. (The two trillion dollars spent in Iraq and Afghanistan could have solarized our energy supply and changed our health care system but we wouldn’t have spent the money for that.) Our hired military forces don’t keep us safe, they bring us prestige and let us engage in expensive and unwise military adventures, that would never be undertaken with a people’s army of draftees, trained by a small core of professionals, the proper army for a democracy, since it brings the implications of foreign policy home. I see nothing to fear and much to hope for in a shrinking population and a shrinking economy—better food, a working natural environment, more open space in cities, cleaner rivers, fish runs, birds moving through the trees and migrating over our heads.