A Peek at the Big Picture: Part III
“Growth is madness!” Image source: Rama
In the first two parts of this article we began to connect sprawl with its primary root causes: population growth and growth in per capita land consumption. Population growth, of course, drives much more than sprawl. It has combined in recent decades with increased per capita resource consumption (of which per capita land consumption is a part) to bring about the worst human-caused environmental losses ever seen. Why then have the U.S. and other countries not taken decisive steps to address population growth and resource consumption levels? [1]
A corporate culprit
The answer is complex, but we can zero in with confidence on portions of it. The common phrase, “follow the money” is apt when looking for some of the key social forces enabling growth of population and growth of resource consumption to continue unabated in many countries. And this leads us to Bob Cohen, mentioned in the prior installments of this article. Bob describes himself as a social activist, fighting corporate globalization. This puts Bob squarely in the anti-globalization movement. Indeed, Bob was among the more than 40,000 activists who converged on Seattle during the 1999 meeting of the World Trade Organization to protest globalization. Widespread concern about globalization continues today and, for our purposes here, sheds light on the source of some of those forces perpetuating growth at a time when we’ve already grown out of our earth.
The definition of “globalization” varies according to the bias of the source. But among those in the anti-globalization movement it generally refers to select aspects of the ever increasing volume of international corporate economic exchange conducted with progressively fewer national boundary-related constraints. Those aspects are seen as negative in their impacts on areas including cultural identity, justice, the poor, and ecological sustainability. A particularly important aspect is the growing global power of a relatively small number of enormous corporations. From this point of view, one succinct definition is:
In its most innocuous sense, globalization simply refers to the complex of forces that trend toward a single world society. Among these forces are mass communications, commerce, increased ease of travel, the internet, popular culture, and the increasingly widespread use of English as an international language. The more important sense of the term refers to a process, well underway, which trends toward the undermining of national sovereignty, and therefore citizen’s rights, in favor of the economic interests of gigantic transnational corporations (TNCs). The latter already comprise more than half of the largest “economies”
A fuller definition is more multifaceted and, as suggested above, does include elements most “anti-globalization” activists see as desirable.
The same absurd notion we’ve come to know
The issue of globalization is, in fact, large and multifaceted, and I won’t dissect it further here. No matter your view of it, however, it’s clear that to a large extent, it’s about growth — growth of economic activity and growth of corporations. The theme, in fact, is similar to what we see when looking at urban and suburban development. It’s the absurd notion of endless growth. (We shouldn’t be surprised to find the same irrational theme on both the local level of residential or commercial development and the global corporate level. After all, the urban growth industry is merely a part of the larger corporate economy.) It’s fundamental to corporate globalization, though it’s not emphasized publicly by corporate powers. As Mark Luccarelli writes in a relevant book review:
The geopolitical considerations of the American state in shaping globalization —a vision of endless growth and the commodification of everything—is usually shunted aside in favor of viewing it as a free market utopia entailing a powerful cultural process of liberation for the masses through consumption.
This conventional view of growth is one which, if you make the logical error of buying into it, suggests a need for ongoing population growth to sustain it. As long as we cannot work toward a “steady state economy,” we’ll need more and more people to fuel the almighty growth. This is the view of most in the corporate world who, naturally, also support ever increasing consumption levels. More people consuming their products, and more consumption per person is the formula for profits in this primitively simple model. For a good discussion of the linkage between economic growth and population and consumption growth I recommend Gabor Zovanyi’s book which is essential reading for those interested in the “big picture” on which we’re now focused.
Alternatives blocked by the same forces?
With the entire corporate world yearning for growth, and therefore both population growth and increased per capita resource consumption, it’s no wonder those who call for national policies to address these issues have had, at best, limited success. For example, it’s obviously been an enduring challenge for anyone to find funding to develop alternative energy sources, sources needed (along with increased conservation) to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels. We can return to the varied careers of Bob Cohen to see an instance of this problem. Bob was program manager for the Department of Energy’s Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC)/ocean energy program during the 1970s. He saw the program lose its tenuous funding in large part, it seems, as a result of the political influence of the nuclear energy industry which viewed it as a competitor which might undermine its own growth. It doesn’t take much digging to find many similar stories of the challenges faced by those looking for funding for alternative energy research and development.
Where do we start?
Follow the money, indeed. To understand the root causes of sprawl and the environmental destruction it wreaks you have to look, then, at the larger, economically motivated forces battled by those opposed to globalization and those fighting the broader growth imperative which, as Zovanyi so well explains, is so pervasive as to be central to our dominant social paradigm. What is the alternative to the erroneous economic notion of “endless growth”? It’s a big question, but a good place to start might be with study of the potential of the “steady state economy.” Sites like CASSE and The Sustainable Scale Project provide excellent information in that regard, as do authors like Herman Daly and Brian Czech. As Zovanyi says:
The central challenge facing the growth management movement is one of having to replace the growth imperative currently driving the movement with the imperative of ecological sustainability.
As an alternative to such unsustainable activity, communities in the United States can take the first step toward the inevitable process of moving the country to a state of sustainable behavior by implementing strategies to stop growth. Rather than pursue the false end of “smart growth,” local jurisdictions must act to stop growth before they can hope to attain and then maintain livable and sustainable communities.
And that’s how the “big picture” comes together to make sense at the local level. I’d like to thank Al Bartlett and Bob Cohen for providing the leads to help put the picture together.
[1] To be fair, some countries have made effective strides toward reducing their national fertility rates. As Stennett discusses in In Growth We Trust, Mexico, for example, has used free family planning programs and media campaigns to reduce its total fertility rate since the mid 1970s from about 7 to 2.5 children per family. Yet many countries still have fertility rates far in excess of the “replacement rate”, or the rate which would eventually lead to a stable population. Some countries, are near or below replacement fertility levels, but are still growing in population due to (a) high immigration levels, and/or (b) the “demographic momentum” causing continued population growth as large numbers of people born during previous times of high fertility rates now enter their reproductive years. (The latter means that it takes 50 years or more for a country’s population to stabilize after the fertility rate reaches the replacement level.) The U.S., for example, is near the replacement level for developed countries, with a total fertility rate of roughly 2.1. Yet due to these additional forces we continue to grow, for the time being, by about three million people per year. We are among those countries, as well, with high enough immigration levels that even without the continued population momentum driven by our past “baby boom” we would continue to experience population growth. The U.S., by the way, nevertheless has a higher fertility rate than most other developed nations.