Growth for the sake of growth

Flatirons Still Life. Boulder, Colorado, 2014

Ever try to repair a home printer? You can’t. You just buy a new one.

We just bought new mobile phones. Did the old ones stop working? Were they broken? No, they worked perfectly fine–but there was a new, better model out, you see. I like the new phone (especially the camera) but I also feel a bit ill about what was really an unnecessary purchase.

Hmmm… Does Apple have a master plan to keep us buying-replacing-buying-replacing forevermore?

How about the real plan to actually reduce the life of the light bulb so more could be sold? This was back in the early part of the 20th century.

And then there was the move in the 1920s toward annual changes to automobile models to get folks to buy a new one each year.

We are told that the patriotic thing to do is go to the mall and fill those shopping bags, for the sake of the country’s economy. The economy doesn’t go or grow unless we spend our money and buy things. Constantly.

Yes, there are certain times when you can pay a bit more and purchase a product that will last a lifetime, but guess what? Marketing folks have thrown another kink into that plan: fashion and style. Next year, the product will be “new and improved” with different colors, styling, and slightly modified features. Gotta look cool for your friends and keep up with the Joneses, dontcha know. So, you end up buying another.

This is called “planned obsolescence” and it tends to burn up resources unnecessarily, to keep the economy moving ahead. Try the film, Planned Obsolescence, on for size to delve more into this interesting, frustrating, topic.

What’s behind all of this? Growth. That is the big V-8 motor behind it all. (As Edward Abbey said: “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”

Our current economic system is based on the concept that everything grows…the population, the towns and cities, your income, the stock market, and so on. We take it for granted. It is patriotic. Anything less is seen as anti-American. All things are measured in terms of economic–not intrinsic, spiritual, or philosophical–value. A degree in the Arts? Useless. A degree in Marketing or Engineering? Now yer talkin’!

In fact, we actually measure growth on a minute-by-minute basis via the Dow Jones Industrial Average. That is really a crazy notion if you stop to think about it even for a nanosecond. Does that kind of measure make any real sense when you place humanity within the context of its multi-million year history? We have our eyes looking down so close to our toes that we have no idea what might be looming ahead in the next hundred yards threatening to bonk us on the head.

The logical outcome of continued growth is this (yes, it may take awhile, but it is inevitable): eventually the entire world will literally be covered with humans and their constructions and excretions. Any semblance of the original ecosystem will be gone. No lions, tigers, or bears, oh my. No wilderness. In the best of cases, wilderness will simply be replaced by a giant human-managed garden of some kind.

I see only two ways we might avoid this:

1) Our technology eventually improves enough to take us to another planet on which we can survive (and grow, of course!). There are some problems here, though. First, that we could eventually achieve this technological feat is conjecture–will we really be able to do this before Spaceship Earth becomes uninhabitable for us? Second, we would simply be transferring the same anthropocentric philosophy to another location. Nothing would change…and cancerous growth would continue. Then it will simply be “on to the next planet!”

Or,

2) Mother Nature intervenes (actually, just shrugs her shoulders ever so slightly) and says, “Enough is enough.” She then introduces a virus, a major volcanic event, or a meteorite to cut humanity down to manageable size, or eliminate it altogether.

But, there is a third way. To wit…

We could recognize that we are part of an ecological system, not separate from it. It is not here for us to use up. Pulling out one card at a time–the Spotted Owl, the Black-footed Ferret, the Black Rhino, etc–will eventually result in a collapse of that house of cards. Maintenance of the bio-system is critical to our very survival and for our quality of life. Many indigenous cultures recognized this concept instinctively, if not consciously. We could revisit and reclaim this way of seeing the world.

We could search for ways to NOT grow, in the current sense of the word, in order to maintain an equilibrium within the ecosystem of Planet Earth. This might mean controlling population, controlling the size of cities and towns (and condensing them), eliminating planned obsolescence and unnecessary manufacturing as much as practicable, maintaining large expanses of wilderness or UNcivilized open spaces for the rest of Earth’s species.

We could look at other definitions of growth–improvements in art, literature, philosophy, general life skills. Imagine if we worked on growing a “peace culture”…a culture in which “personal and spiritual growth” was more important than the accumulation of material goods? Internal growth instead of pure external, material growth. There are other ways to grow.

Weird ideas? Well, how are things working out today in our material culture? Granted, we have some pretty nice “stuff” to play with…nice toys, for sure. But, do they really give us that more complete satisfaction and contentedness that we all crave? How are our personal relationships? How is the suicide rate? How about our incarceration rate? Drug use? How many folks are living a Prozac-medicated life? Child abuse? Alcoholism? How mentally healthy are we, really?

All this doesn’t mean we abandon technology. To the contrary, we continue to refine it…BUT, we adapt it to a different philosophy and different ends–a philosophy of a peaceful, sustainable, and rich coexistence with all the other species on Earth. Maybe a form of high-tech neotribalism? ¿Quién sabe?

I have no idea where us human beans are headed over the next century. But it sure seems to me that something has to give before we find ourselves in a completely fouled nest here on lovely, crowded, Spaceship Earth.