Growing Up

“We can have growth of love, information, spirituality, poetry, but we can’t have growth in the sheer number of molecules extracted from the Earth moving through the economy. This simply can’t grow without limit unless we want our civilization to plunge miserably into oblivion in the fairly near future.”

Stephan Harding* interviewed by Rob Hopkins at Transition Culture

Isn’t it time we grew up a little? Humans grow their entire lives, but at a certain point they stop getting taller – that kind of growth is limited, we don’t exist in a world of expanding giants. But these people still grow as people, they learn, they experience if they are lucky they become wiser. Stopping getter bigger didn’t stop them getting better – they grow all the time, in ways much more interesting and sophisticated than the merely spatial.

When they were little, they used to eat small portions of food and wear small clothes – and as they grew taller they eat bigger portions and wore bigger clothes. Then they stopped getting taller, and the potions of food they needed plateaued. When they eat bigger portions than this they got unhealthy and overweight, and even began to shorten their lifespan. When they stopped getting taller, they didn’t need to keep getting bigger and bigger clothes (unless they were eating bigger portions than they needed). Their clothes still deteriorate over time and need to be replaced but when they choose well made clothes this doesn’t have to happen too often. Some people keep getting more and more clothes that they never wear and filling up their houses with them – but these aren’t really clothes any more they are possessions and have a completely different meaning.

Growth – economic growth, as it is currently realised on Earth – requiring the ever faster turnover of raw resources into saleable commodities has no future. We live in a world of finite physical resources. Many commentators from both right and left hold that human imagination is however infinite, and thus growth is not limited – because we will constantly find new ways of better using resources and finding new resources. Push these ideas a little and they all reveal faith in free markets and long term plans to mine the solar system. They also reveal that their only concept of growth is related to the established economic model, and reflects none of those attractive human elements that Harding speaks about.

What kind of growth do we want?

James Piers Taylor, 13/07/2006

*Stephan Harding is the Resident Ecologist at Schumacher College, the course co-ordinator of their MSc in Holistic Science and the author of Animate Earth (Green Books, 2006).

IMAGE: American Progress by John Gast (c.1872)