Brent Barrett’s Home Planet: We need to break our addiction to endless growth

The foundation of Finland's enviable social stats is that people there are content. Photo / Visit Finland

Opinion:

Growth beat out prosperity on the day, but only by a whisker. It was surprisingly close, as growth had been king since forever, and rarely challenged.

The upstart prosperity attracted support from nearly half your city council, but didn’t quite have the numbers. The matter at hand was the three-yearly revision of the council’s highest level of strategic direction: the vision, goals and values. The point in debate was whether the headline economic goal would continue to be “innovative and growing”, or evolve to be “innovative and prosperous”.

Arguments were made from all sides, contesting the meaning of words, whether goals should show aspiration or merely reflect reality, and what threshold justifies change.

The arguments for prosperous centred on a more inclusive approach to economic success, and breaking our addiction to endless growth. Which sounded good to me, but in the end there were nine votes for growing, and just seven for prosperous. Winner takes all.

I’ve been cooling for some time on the notion of endless growth as a sensible goal, even for a small city. The more we look at our local, national and global economy, at how it is funded and what it achieves, it is clear growth is really our best attempt to keep a highly vulnerable system from imploding.

In brief, debt fuels growth which keeps money trickling up, generates cheap entertainment and distances the fortunate from the unfortunate so as to enable more growth.

I’ve recently begun exploring what advocates dub de-growth. This approach recognises that endless growth harms the very foundations of our future. Even today, we’re living well beyond what Mother Nature can sustain. And with all our social stability and economic progress reliant on nature, that’s a massive issue.

What de-growth offers is to ease off our energy use and forced growth, enabling us to work within nature’s limits. Which is rather better than ignoring the fact that endlessly demanding growth will take us to some rather dark places.

While it takes some getting used to, there are some real positives to the de-growth model. Like the opportunity to organise around sufficiency and satisfaction, rather than always craving more.

On the topic of satisfaction, Finland quite often comes up as the happiest country in the world by those who do surveys of these matters. When probed, the foundation of their enviable social stats is that people there are content.

Zooming into our outlook here in Palmerston North, achieving a state of contentment, of having enough food, time, shelter and status is a very liberating concept. Combining an upper limit on personal financial wealth accumulation with systems guaranteeing that even the neediest person will have their needs met, frees up lots of capacity to invest in personal fulfilment beyond the purely financial.

While contentment and the economics of enough are an attractive goal, I’m not sure de-growth is the best way to sell it. In doing things simpler, more locally, with lower energy demand and more self-sufficiently some things will grow rapidly. Things like local food systems. New transport networks. Free and flexible time. Creativity.

So rather than de-growth, is it perhaps re-growth? A flourishing of the things that matter most, while releasing the unhealthy and the unsustainable. This includes some real transitions, like less fossil-fueled travel. So yes, that means fewer flights and car travel in our immediate future.

Doing so frees us from fueling endless growth, even as we see it picking apart the very climate and natural systems that are the foundation of our survival. Much better a future of de-growth and re-growth enabling the economics of enough.

Brent Barrett is an environmental advocate, Green city councillor and scientist. The views expressed here are his own.