All posts by Clare

The End Of Growth

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The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality by Richard Heinberg, New Society Publishers

The End of Growth had been on my reading list for some time, and after watching a podcast of Richard Heinberg’s address to the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, I decided it was time to track it down and read it.

The author is a member of the United States-based Post Carbon Institute, which has numerous contributors and publications dedicated to exploring a resilient, post-carbon society. The premise of The End of Growth, is, not unexpectedly, that “(e)conomic growth as we have known it is over and done with.” In Heinberg’s view, an ever expanding economy and the quantities of energy and material goods flowing through it is a fantastic Ponzi-like bubble, and the economic crisis of 2007-2008 (GFC), which continues around the world, was the inevitable culmination of that trajectory of growth.

After some Economics for the Hurried – a fascinating, but thankfully not dense, context for our current economic system – the author then devotes a large proportion of the book to detailing main reasons why growth has ended and won’t return: primarily a combination of financial and natural limits, which of course will be aggravated by climate change. The GFC revealed the financial limits of a growth-based economy. Resource scarcity – oil, water, food, minerals – climate change and general environmental decline [Tim Flannery’s work around contemporary biodiversity loss here in Australia is a telling example of decline and its huge impacts on our own human ecology] show that Earth’s limits have also been reached.

The prognosis is dire, and the author is of the view that efficiency, substitution and innovation, nor the China phenomenon touted by some as a cure-all, are more placebo than panacea and will not overcome the natural and financial limits of the global economic system.

All this sounds rather dreary but The End of Growth is about challenging well-entrenching doctrine and creating the impetus for creating alternatives, so it’s important that it be rigorous and thoroughly evidence-based. The End of Growth was written post GFC and new material is regularly added at endofgrowth.com.

Fortunately, there is cause for hope (and plenty of interesting reading in the endnotes to follow up!) in the burgeoning field of ecological economics, transition movements and the can-do approach of communities around the world, all of which feature throughout the book and especially in the final chapters. Those chapters, Redefining Progress and Life After Growth gave me cause for hope (OK, I admit I jumped ahead to these!) that there may be paths forward through the sometimes overwhelming mess we are facing.

The End of Growth urges us to realise that until we address the terminally flawed global economic system, the job of protecting Earth and healing the wounds made to her, will be impossible.

Despite its confronting realism, The End of Growth,  is approachable and thought-provoking. Though, definitely the start of my reading on this subject.

Rating: Highly Recommended

I want to live!

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One of the silver linings of being a mum or dad is getting to watch kids’ movies, especially animated ones, with impunity.

And one of my favourites is Wall-E.

Wall-E  is old-school robot consigned to clean up a heavily polluted, uninhabitable urban Earth that humans have deserted for their intergalactic cruise liners hundreds of years ago. Wall-E just keeps going. Cleaning up. Watching musicals. (So far we have a lot of in common). But Wall-E is also a historian, a curator of an quirky trash ‘n treasure collection, and a custodian, not just of memories , but of life itself.

When the super-sleek latest model EVE lands on Earth for a regular search for signs of life, she comes upon Wall-E and is introduced to his most treasured find – an improbable seedling, green and alive in a brown landscape of towering junk. Seedling and Wall-E end up on the massive Axiom, where humans have settled into a sofa-bound life of mindless comfort and consumerism (all served by the trusty crew of robots – but that’s another story).

Even in the face of a (literally) crushing defeat by the Axiom’s sinister Auto Pilot, Wall-E does not opt out and leave the fledgling little seedling to be flushed out the airlock.

The little robot is more alive than the Axiom’s human passengers.

But then Captain, learning about Earth – home – for the first time, glimpses this. The centuries-long cruise has become a permanent exodus. Despite Auto’s evidence of an uninhabitable brown planet (that is almost unrecognisable to us), Wall-E’s little seedling fills him with the courage to declare – “I don’t want to survive . . . I want to live”.

[Of course, it ends happily and they all go home and grow a new Garden of Eden to the Peter Gabriel soundtrack (it is a kids’ movie after all). And now my almost-14 year old sage is telling me I have to read The Fault in Our Stars for a little intertextual Wall-E brilliance.]

I want to live. I want people to be alive, not surviving in miserable poverty or slaving away producing cheap crap that ends up polluting the land and sea and sky, nor simply, thoughtlessly consuming day by day. I want us to see Earth as home – really. Take it under our wing and nurture it. Put ourselves on the line for it. Be custodians – for Earth, for each other.

Otherwise, we’re just surviving.