Letter to the Editor

To the Editor:

Taken alone, President Franklin Roosevelt’s statement “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” is not very convincing. After all, when he uttered these words civilization was being threatened by powerful nations whose leaders were charismatic but delusional, and clearly dangerous (Adolf Hitler and the emperor of Japan, along with that country’s imperial cult). But in context, it appears the president was trying to say that our fears must be kept in perspective, based on rational calculation from known facts, one of them being a healthy assessment of what we don’t know. He was also referring to the human tendency to let fear become irrational, which can take our flight and fight instincts and energies into extreme and counterproductive actions. 

I believe we are at such a place now in this society, indeed, in the civilization of which it is a part. Many people – maybe most – sense that things are unstable and the future more uncertain than they expected growing up. This is no more evident than in the current presidential race in our country, where the managers of the two major parties contended with fairly radical candidates that weren’t (and one still isn’t) very manageable, that blatantly appeal to fear and offer unrealistic, simplistic, solutions. Even the so-called “establishment candidates” of both parties, while not playing on fear as blatantly as the two outliers, were also not addressing the underlying cause of our unease; neither are the two winners, nor are the Green Party and Libertarian Party candidates, for that matter. 

I believe the underlying societal unease is justified, but the fear is mostly misplaced. I think there is strong evidence pointing to the cause of our unease: we are hitting the limits to economic growth in a finite biosphere – growth that has so far depended on ever-increasing resource use (some of those resources being finite), a high rate of return for our investment in the most basic resources, especially energy, and uncontrolled waste production. Lately, we are seeing our return on investment in energy and important minerals falling (useful energy and materials gained from energy invested to find, extract, and use them), and waste is filling and changing our world, especially the atmosphere and oceans.

Additionally, the growth we’re accustomed to depends on and has produced ever-increasing complexity in all spheres, whose by-products add to waste production (some toxic) and has helped increase economic inequality, all accompanied by a dramatic increase in debt – government, business, and individual. Applying ever more complex solutions to problems has been the trend for 300 years or so; it’s so ingrained that we have not considered that the cost of that increasing complexity may reach a point where it’s not worth paying – that the law of diminishing returns governs everything, even technology. In other words, we may have reached the point where “progress” has become the enemy of prosperity, or at least basic happiness.

Debt (including the money-printing frenzy of central banks) is a way to bring future benefits into the present and has been able to mask the diminishing returns and limits of our economy, especially falling real wages for hourly workers. Lately, that habit is being exposed for what it was, a temporary fix. Yet, without economic growth, debts are not repaid – and both sides of debt transactions assume growth. But when debts are not repaid, money vanishes. 

If we are encountering limits to growth – if we are in fact now inhabiting a “full world” (as Herman Daly puts it), then business as usual will not help; in fact it will hurt us in the long run; but neither will succumbing to irrational fears, which lead us to blame this or that person or group (the government, the immigrants, the corporations, Obama, etc.) – anyone but ourselves and the system we’ve all helped create and fear to see changed. Instead of this blame game, or indulging in another unhealthy tendency – escapist fantasies of techno-grandiosity or apocalyptic nightmares (two sides of the same coin), we should be working to understand these limits and wrestling with the question of how we can manage them and transition to a more realistic economy – one that can live within this biosphere (literally, spaceship earth). But first we must face the fact that we cannot have our planet and eat it too – that there is no planet B. How absurd is it to think we can exploit other worlds when we can’t manage to live on the one we were adapted/created for? 

I am not saying that we should give up on creativity and innovation, but that we must direct those energies toward realistic goals with long-term survival in mind – survival not just of us humans but of the entire biosphere. 

To explore this further I encourage you to read Gail Tverberg, Nicholas Taleb, Kurt Cobb, J.M. Greer, Erik Lindberg, Joseph Tainter, the Post-Carbon Institute, Wendell Berry, and the like.

Steve Turman, Red Oak