Conversation Earth

Robust economic growth has become the Holy Grail of public policy and politics. But some economists and many scientists have come to believe growth has become “uneconomic." Former World Bank Senior Economist Herman Daly explains this in terms we can all understand.

Daly co-founded the journal, Ecological Economics, and has written and spoken extensively about the fact that “the economy is a sub-system of a larger system. The larger system being the biosphere – the environment.”

In this newly released 2010 interview, Herman Daly postulates that, in a full world, the costs of further economic growth exceed the benefits, and we are reaching a point where it is physically impossible to keep growing the global economy.

Using easy to understand, real-world examples, Daly delivers an aha moment. After listening to this interview, one is likely to conclude, “Of course! It’s the environment, stupid!”

“One of the ways that radical ideas become more mainstream is when those of us who hold them aren’t afraid to speak about them.” This thought has guided much of journalism professor Robert Jensen’s work. His writing and speaking often focus on the news that “we live in an economy that is based on the destruction of places all over world.” In this 2015 interview, Jensen explains what he calls “an unprecedented set of threats to the possibility of ongoing, large-scale, human habitation of the planet.”

Our ecosystems contribute tens of trillions of dollars to our economy every year, but – as L. Hunter Lovins notes, “At present we’re losing every major ecosystem on the planet…What are we doing to ourselves?...We have the…intelligence…to make different choices.” Hunter Lovins co-authored the best-selling book, Natural Capitalism, with Paul Hawken and Amory Lovins. In this interview, she outlines those choices and shares how they benefit businesses and the planet.

Today it could be argued that human beings daily act against our own self-interests. How? Biologist Paul Ehrlich and fellow scientists tell us we are expanding our population and economy beyond the Earth's carrying capacity - at our peril. Why do we insist on continuing?

Ehrlich has been a keen observer of human behavior for over 50 years, and he thinks “we need a millennium assessment of human behavior.” If we can understand how we behave, and why we behave that way, perhaps we can figure out how to behave as though we want to hang around another thousand years.

As a young man, Rex Weyler joined early Greenpeace expeditions to document and stop commercial whaling. He went on to co-found Greenpeace International, and as a journalist has covered the subject of ecology extensively. In this newly released 2010 interview, Weyler shares his observations of “what can happen as a civilization grows out of control.” Technology, economics, consumption, population and politics are all in his cross-hairs.

“The human machine is just steamrolling…toward disaster.”

Weyler has lived a rich life and has a keen understanding of the source of joy, but there is sadness in his voice when he talks about how civilization grew right past ecological limits to growth.

“I'm not concerned that my children will consume less stuff and have to live lifestyles more like my grandparents. I'm more concerned that my children will have to live in chaos because we were stupid and we tried to drive right past all these limits….”

Weyler does express some hope for the future, as well, and outlines changes needed to bring human civilization back to living within ecological limits.

“What I'm working toward in my life and in my community is that we make these changes intelligently, peacefully, within our communities.”

What went wrong with the environmental movement? Environmental activist, organizer and author Lorna Salzman shares her thoughts about climate change, consumerism, cheap energy, economics, lawyers and politics. She discusses “what went wrong with the environmental movement,” plus irrationality, denial, and outright lies we tell ourselves and each other.

Lorna Salzman has the chops to be an outspoken critic of many in the modern environmental movement. She played a key role in the early days of Friends of the Earth alongside David Brower (the first executive director of the Sierra Club), beginning a 40-year career as an environmental activist, writer, lecturer and organizer. A contender for the Green Party presidential nomination in 2004, Salzman is an iconoclast in every sense of the word.

Lorna Salzman is a member of the New York Academy of Sciences. In 2000 she received the International Earth Day Award from the Earth Society Foundation. A collection of her essays can be found in the book, Politics as if Evolution Mattered. This interview was recorded at her summer cottage in 2010.

“The age of growth and the age in which growth is going to be considered a good thing is coming to an end.” The late sociologist William R. Catton was certain of this, but spent a significant portion of his professional life attempting to understand why mainstream society was reluctant to prove his point.

Catton authored the landmark book, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, published in 1980. He brought important sociological perspective to a subject dominated by biologists and physicists. He observed that our lives are built around an obsolete cultural belief system, a “cornucopian myth,” developed when the size of human civilization had not yet outgrown the carrying capacity of the planet.

In this 2010 interview, William Catton spoke of another path he felt would be much more rewarding. “It’s going to be a change, an end of this world and a movement into that world. But the world we move into might have some rewards that we’ll be happy to have.”

Stephanie Mills made headlines in the Spring of 1969 when she vowed, in her commencement address, to conceive no children. “Our days as a race on this planet are, at this moment, numbered,” she proclaimed, “and the reason for our finite, unrosy future is that we are breeding ourselves out of existence.”

This launched a career for Stephanie as a thoughtful, articulate champion for ecology and social change. She became a noted author and lecturer on bioregionalism, ecological restoration, community economics, and voluntary simplicity. In this 2010 interview, Stephanie reflects on the life she has led and the important decision she made at the age of twenty. She shares insight about things like “the 500-year war on subsistence,” and the dumbing down of discourse about overpopulation.

How big is your ecological footprint? Probably bigger than you think. After all, out of sight, out of mind. As an originator of ecological footprint analysis, population ecologist William Rees knows a thing or two about our impact on the planet. In this interview he provides some fascinating, and surprising insights.

“Cultural narrative” is our understanding of how the world works. What’s important to us? How do we define success, progress and happiness? Rees observes that our current narrative is the worldview that neverending growth in income, and growth in the scale of the human project are desirable and possible. We’re naturally optimistic, and short-sighted, so we have a natural disposition to live in denial of the physical realities of our world. We’d “rather have a party now, than worry about having parties ten, fifteen, thirty years from now.”

Rees raises the question, “are we an intelligent species?” If we are, then it’s time to rewrite our cultural narrative.

Photo by Nick Wiebe (CC BY-SA 3.0)

“I don’t think there’s a lot of excuses, frankly, for not doing the right thing.”

Anishinaabe orator, author, economist and activist Winona LaDuke doesn’t mince words in her quest to light a path for us to “hang around another thousand years.” “Your ecosystem seems to be your mall,” LaDuke tell us. When I asked her where she comes from, her answer was “the real world. You can drink the water out of a lake!” Something to think about.

Winona observes that we are “doing things only addicts would do,” including sedating ourselves with a lot of information and television. The author of Recovering the Sacred tells us we need a society that is “respectful, resilient, and ecologically and socially responsible.” Instead, “we have a society based on conquest, on consuming more than it needs.” We emphasize “quarterly profits over intergenerational responsibility.”