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| Source: http://southweb.org/lifewise/being-honest-about-consumption/ |
As an international student my job options are even more limited than normal, and the options aren’t really that good for anyone at the moment. However, even if my job this past year wasn’t my first choice, I have been fortunate to at least be doing some work for an environmental organization. And though door-to-door canvassing isn’t very profitable or exciting – indeed it’s often even downright depressing - it does provide a perspective often lacking in those higher up within the environmental movement food chain. Every activist, no matter what their cause, should have to spend at least a week knocking on doors trying to make their pitch while also taking questions, and more than a little criticism, from the 5 to 10% typically willing to engage a complete stranger standing on their doorstep.
It’s easy to dismiss the criticism we receive at the door, but the truth is the environmental movement (myself included) has done a very poor job of articulating a message people can readily embrace. We too often ignore or mock the concerns people have about jobs and economic growth with quips like ‘there won’t be any jobs if we don’t have a liveable planet’ or ‘you can’t eat money.’ True enough, but these types of replies don’t really get to the premise behind the challenge and frequently come loaded with implicit accusations of selfishness or negligence directed toward the person raising the issue. If you want people to reject the current unsustainable model, you have to first provide them with a workable alternative, and at best the environmental movement only ever hints at one. In the absence of such an alternative people are going to stick with the option that provides the best chance of bringing home a paycheque under the current circumstances, even if a small one. As the old saying goes, better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. It’s typically necessary for the argument in favour of the new devil to be more compelling than the argument in favour of the status quo. The only exceptions are times when things become so unbearable people are willing to throw the old devil overboard and take there chances with whatever might come next, but as history shows acting out of desperation often means ending up with something even worse.
Of course, we can and do provide nice little sound bites at the door about alternative energy jobs, doing a little restoration work here and there, or ending raw log exports, etc., but these policies would, at best, only buy time, and increasingly I’m hearing even from people favourably disposed to environmental protection that they know it. Green energy alone doesn’t fundamentally change our relationship to the economy one bit, though it might change our relationship to the local power utility. In a world powered by wind turbines and solar panels will people still be expected to get up and go to work in the morning for wages that too often are inadequate? Will they still be asked to consume more and more to support growth? If so, less economic security and more environmental destruction will still be the inevitable outcome. Wind turbines and solar panels are part of the solution, but only if they are part of a paradigm shift that is focused on minimizing consumption instead of consuming even more as efficiently as possible.
Environmentalism, with a few notable exceptions, is scared to death of taking on the premise of growth. A steady state economy doesn’t sell, or so we’re told. I honestly can’t think of anyone outside of a few economists that has really put any effort into it. Everyone else, from the executive director of the Sierra Club to prime ministers and presidents, insist we can have both economic growth and environmental sustainability. This is true no matter where they fall on the political spectrum. Indeed, this assumption has almost reached the level of an article of faith. I imagine someday historians will label this the age of cognitive dissonance. Regardless, when we’re pitching green jobs all we’re really doing is advocating for a cleaner kind of consumption and intuitively the public knows it: we’re talking on the one hand about changing the technology the economy uses or how many resources we can afford to extract from the environment while on the other advocating for leaving the economic system itself largely intact. We make similar arguments when campaigning to set aside wilderness areas or create a new national park, often focusing largely on the tourism jobs such designations will create rather than the role intact ecosystems play in sustaining local economies on their own. The tons of carbon expelled getting the tourists to the park in the first place is hardly a consideration. So far as the general public is concerned all mainstream environmentalism seems to be doing is pitching a kind of green capitalism – an oxymoron if ever there was one. To an understandably increasingly cynical public environmentalism has thus become just one more face in a crowd of competing interest groups. What sets it apart from the rest isn't its advocacy of a new way of doing things, but how much of doing things the current way it is willing to tolerate. If environmentalism wants to be taken seriously it must embrace economic security as a necessary means to achieving sustainability, and this will require abandoning growth and espousing a steady state economy.
Development under the
growth model typically means a new mall or subdivision, with all the associated
activities that go into creating and sustaining them. However, as Herman Daly pointed out in Steady State Economics, development can mean something else
entirely:
“If we use ‘growth’ to mean quantitative change, and ‘development’ to refer to qualitative change, then we may say that a steady-state economy develops but does not grow, just as the planet earth, of which the human economy is a subsystem, develops but does not grow.”
Early on in his book Daly articulated the course such an economy would
follow. “Steady-state economics
channels technical progress in the socially benign directions of small scale,
decentralization, increased durability of products, and increased long-run
efficiency in the use of scarce resources.” A steady state economy would be locally focused instead of
globally focused, it would plan durability, repair, and recycling into its
products instead of obsolescence, and it focuses economic activity in the
direction of improved efficiency with little to no regard for growth. If, for some reason, we need to create
jobs in a steady state economy, then we look for areas where we can improve
efficiency and attempt to create them there rather than looking for additional
opportunities to sell more stuff.
The implications of this approach should be obvious: a shorter workweek, some degree of guaranteed annual income so those who desire to volunteer or to focus on other activities rather than employment can without fear. Who out there in the environmental movement is selling this as an alternative to our current consumption driven system? To listen to the politicians and various environmental spokespeople you would think no one was. However, one notable recent exception was British Columbia’s Green Party. In the province’s last election it endorsed some level of guaranteed annual income, an essential step on the path to a steady-state economy. In addition, the concept is slowly but surely appearing with increasing regularity in some media, though often indirectly via debates regarding abandoning the GDP in favour of new measures of economic activity that take into account wellbeing, voluntarism, and other valued human activities the GDP doesn’t consider. Now is the time for the environmental movement to get completely on board and stop sending conflicting signals when it comes to environmental protection and growth. Your credibility depends upon it.
The implications of this approach should be obvious: a shorter workweek, some degree of guaranteed annual income so those who desire to volunteer or to focus on other activities rather than employment can without fear. Who out there in the environmental movement is selling this as an alternative to our current consumption driven system? To listen to the politicians and various environmental spokespeople you would think no one was. However, one notable recent exception was British Columbia’s Green Party. In the province’s last election it endorsed some level of guaranteed annual income, an essential step on the path to a steady-state economy. In addition, the concept is slowly but surely appearing with increasing regularity in some media, though often indirectly via debates regarding abandoning the GDP in favour of new measures of economic activity that take into account wellbeing, voluntarism, and other valued human activities the GDP doesn’t consider. Now is the time for the environmental movement to get completely on board and stop sending conflicting signals when it comes to environmental protection and growth. Your credibility depends upon it.
