The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [7]
We don’t know what the actual carrying capacity of the planet is, but we know it isn’t one inflexible number; it depends on our levels and patterns of production and consumption. That raises huge issues about equity in resource distribution and value judgments about how much is enough. Should we be asking how many people the planet can sustain at the U.S. level of consumption or at the Bangladesh level of consumption? And, importantly, who decides the answer?
The questions are complicated, but we need to have the conversation and decide on our answers together. We need to do this because there is no doubt we will reach the planet’s carrying capacity; we’re heading in that direction now. And once we cross that line, it’s game over: We depend on this planet to eat, drink, breathe, and live. Figuring out how to keep our life-support system running needs to be our number-one priority. Nothing is more important than finding a way to live together—justly, respectfully, sustainably, joyfully—on the only planet we can call home.
If what’s getting in the way of that is this human invention gone haywire—the take-make-waste economic growth machine—then it’s only logical to consider dismantling and rebuilding that machine, improved upon by all that we’ve learned over the previous decades.
It’s the Economic Growth, Stupid
Economic growth generally refers to an increase in economic activity across the board (trade, services, production, consumption, everything), which also implies an increase in the amount of natural resources extracted from the earth, run through the economy, turned into products, and returned back to the earth as waste. Put simply, this means more. More Stuff. More money. Just like it sounds, growth means getting bigger.
Now, economic growth should be a value-neutral means toward the real goals: meeting everyone’s basic needs and creating healthier communities, greater equality, cleaner energy, sturdier infrastructure, more vibrant culture, etc. For a long time, growth did contribute to those fundamental goals, although it’s important to remember that growth in some places has too often required the exploitation of others. A century ago, when we still had vast stretches of open land, the growth model brought roads and houses and central heating and full bellies. Now, in much of the world, we have those things. In fact, we do have enough Stuff to meet the basic needs of everyone in the world; it’s just not distributed well enough. We have a shortage of sharing rather than a lack of enough.
A big part of the problem we face today is that our dominant economic system values growth as a goal unto itself, above all else. That’s why we use the gross domestic product, or GDP, as the standard measure of success. It counts the value of goods and services made in a country each year. But it leaves out some really important facets of reality. For starters, GDP doesn’t account for the unequal and unfair distribution of wealth or look at how healthy, satisfied, or fulfilled people are. That’s why the GDP of a country can keep rising at a good 2 to 3 percent clip while the incomes of its workers don’t rise at all in the same time period—the wealth gets stuck in one spot in the system. Earth Economics director Dave Batker, a disciple of the great ecological economist Herman Daly, says the GDP is akin to a business owner adding up all her expenses and all her income and then adding them together into “a big dumb useless number.” The fact that the number is big doesn’t tell us a thing about how the business is really doing.15
Another huge problem with how the GDP is calculated is that the true ecological