The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [8]
This is totally messed up: while on the plus side, GDP counts activities that cause pollution and cancer (such as factories making pesticides or polyvinyl chloride) as well as activities to clean up that pollution and treat the cancer (such as environmental remediation and medical care), there is no deduction in the GDP for the pollution released into the air or water or the loss of a forest. In his book Deep Economy, Bill McKibben gave this real world example of the failure of GDP to measure success: for years in Africa, the non-native water hyacinth was clogging waterways, and herbicides had done nothing to solve the problem. Then someone discovered that dried water hyacinth made great material for growing highly nutritious mushrooms, and that when the mushrooms broke down the cellulose in the hyacinths, it made a great medium for earthworms. The worms chomped that down and created high-quality fertilizer, then were themselves feed for chickens. The chickens, of course, provided people with eggs, while their droppings could be used to fuel biogas digesters that produced power, and this reduced the need to cut down more trees for firewood from the already deforested regions in that part of Africa. Because monetary transactions—like the purchase of fertilizer—were reduced, a solution like this actually shows up on a measure like GDP as diminished “growth.”16 Yet it’s clear to anyone with eyes, a brain, and a heart that the hyacinth-mushroom-worm-chicken solution is true progress: healthy and sensible.
For the powers that be—the heads of government and industry—the undisputed goal of our economy is a steady improvement in the GDP, aka growth. Growth as a goal has supplanted the real goals, the things growth was supposed to help us achieve. What I and many others have come to see—and as I hope this book makes abundantly clear—is that too often, as a strategy, focusing on growth for growth’s sake undermines the real goals. Too much of what gets counted toward “growth” today—tons of toxic consumer goods, for example—undermines our net safety, health, and happiness. Despite increasing growth and with all of our advances in technology, science, and medicine, more people than ever are hungry, half the world’s people live on less than $2.50 a day,17 and income inequity is growing within and between countries.
Our society’s deep, unwavering faith in economic growth rests on the assumption that focusing on infinite growth is both possible and good. But neither is true. We can’t run the expanding economic subsystem (take-make-waste) on a planet of fixed size indefinitely: on many fronts, we’re perilously close to the limits of our finite planet already. Infinite economic growth, therefore, is impossible. Nor has it turned out to be, after the point at which basic human needs are met, a strategy for increasing human well-being. After a certain point, economic growth (more money and more Stuff) ceases to make us happier. I mean, if everyone were having fun and enjoying leisure, laughter, and well-being, we might decide that the pursuit of growth was worth the trashing of the planet. But the majority of us are not having fun; instead we are reporting high levels of stress, depression, anxiety, and unhappiness.
Alright. Are you ready? I’m going to say it: this critique of economic growth is a critique of many aspects of capitalism as it functions in the world today. There. I said the word: “capitalism.” It’s the Economic-System-That-Must-Not-Be-Named.
When writing the film script of The Story of Stuff, my intent was to describe what I saw in