Remembering Donella Meadows on Earth Day

 

My copy of Meadows' book with Jenness Pond as backdrop

Donella Meadows is one of our own: She taught at Dartmouth for 29 years before her untimely death at 59 in 2001. Back in the day, I was honored to serve with her on the Monitor's Board of Contributors. She was the lead author of Limits to Growth, a pathbreaking book that sold over 30 million copies. In a sequel, Beyond the Limits, published in 1992, Meadows was our modern-day Paul Revere, calling out the alarm that our global industrial system had exceeded the earth's ecological limits.^⁠1

By the year 2000, the 30^th anniversary of the first Earth Day, Meadows had lost patience: “Earth Day is beginning to remind me of Mother’s Day, a commercial occasion upon which you buy flowers for the person who, every other day of the year, cleans up after you.”^⁠2 Yet Meadows’ influence lives on: in a real sense, she is the mother of the modern degrowth movement, which spurns our obsession with endless growth in favor of ecological sustainability. 

The degrowth movement first gained momentum in the 1990s until Republicans counter-attacked, making Al Gore a laughing stock for his fierce defense of the environment while declaring in lock-step that the climate crisis was "fake news." But after the Great Recession, although the Gross National Product (GDP) began rising again, wages plateaued while inequality grew. This was further evidence to those in the degrowth movement that our current economic model was broken.

And broke, it is! 

Our current brand of capitalism premised on ever-increasing growth is a malignant cancer that, if unchecked, will be the ruin of us all. We all know that doing the same old things that don't work, over and over again, is the definition of insanity. Luckily brilliant innovators, able to think outside the box, have stepped up with practical solutions. Two of them stand out to me.

Tim Jackson, an ecological economist in England, is, perhaps, the pied piper of the degrowth movement. He sees capitalism not as fundamental but only a phase of human development, a myth that no longer works. And I think most of us, at the intuitively level, recognize the truth of what he says: “People are persuaded to spend money we don't have, on things we don't need, to create impressions that won't last, on people we don't care about.”^⁠3

Jackson’s stated mission is to look beyond this myth of growth, “to dare to see beyond capitalism itself.”^⁠4 His latest book, Post Growth, is a captivating, lyrical account of how things could be done better. Each chapter has a main character, a person whose life embodies a viable post-growth theme, ranging from Robert F Kennedy to Emily Dickinson.^⁠5 

Another visionary is Peter Barnes, an entrepreneur who lives in Point Reyes, CA. He believes capitalism played a valuable role in human development but now must be reined in. His premise is that most of today’s wealth is co-inherited from nature and past human efforts, not individually earned. With that in mind, he proposes a new class of property rights, which he calls “universal property,” to protect our land, watersheds, and atmosphere. Instead of letting a few investors privatize the benefits, the idea is to create trusts to manage our natural resources.  The beauty of this approach is that it generates reliable revenue streams to be shared by every citizen^⁠6 while at the same time protecting the environment.

These trusts exist and are spreading. Perhaps the first and most successful was created in Alaska over forty years ago when oil was discovered on the North Slope. The governor, Jay Hammond, persuaded legislators and voters to create a trust, The Alaska Permanent Fund, to invest oil revenues from oil leases for future generations. The fund has now grown to $64 billion and paid out, on average, $1,600 annually to every resident in the state.

I want to close by making amends. I am guilty of the crime confessed to by Barnes: “My generation—the generation born in the mid-twentieth century—has had a grand party.  We have consumed more resources and created more environmental destruction than all previous generations combined.  We are leaving behind one horrendous mess for our children. But we haven’t departed quite yet. We still have time to leave a legacy.^⁠7

On this Earth Day, what better legacy could we leave than incorporating permanence and greater equality into our runaway economic system.

xxx

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth

² https://donellameadows.org/archives/earth-day-plus-thirty-as-seen-by-the-earth/

³ Tim Jackson, Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet

⁴ Jackson, Tim. Post Growth (pp. 32-33). Wiley. Kindle Edition.

⁵ https://earthbound.report/2021/03/29/book-review-post-growth-by-tim-jackson/

⁶ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/frontiers-of-commoning-with-david-bollier/id1501085005?i=1000537233939

⁷ https://peter-barnes.org/decades/2000s/schumacher-lecture-capitalism-the-commons-and-divine-right/