WHAT IS YOUR GROWTH STORY?
It turns out that our worst subjects in school were the ones we needed most. It is an understatement to say that physics and math were not my best subjects in high school. Only the geeks, yes that’s what we called them then, were interested. The rest of us stole tests and did everything we could to pass these boring classes. None of the topics seemed very practical to me. When would I need algebra? Truth be told I can’t say I ever needed algebra in my ‘real’ life. Knowing how electrons behaved didn’t offer any help to get us out of the Vietnam war, which was our focus at the time. I loved nature though. It seemed to live outside the realm of these challenging and most boring of school subjects. Someday I would teach about nature and say goodbye to my dull textbooks which looked as new on the day I got rid of them as the day I had to buy them.
As it turns out, these topics are central to protecting the natural world. They teach about limits and what happens when a species exceeds those limits. Just because our economic systems try to operate outside of the laws of physics, doesn’t mean they could ever be successful in any sustainable way.
I don’t remember an ecology class being offered in my high school in the late 60’s, which would have been helpful. I only had physiology available to me where I could’ve dissected cats, rats and mice. I quickly got a pass out of that class which I only signed up for because the teacher was cute. Looking back, he was only a few years my senior.
Through it all, I somehow landed in the world of environmental education, where I learned to adopt a lens inspired by both physics and math. It turns out that the natural world, in all of its cycles and organisms needs to be protected so that humans can live on this fragile layer of earth we call the biosphere. This all means that in order to truly be human-centric we must operate with a bio-centric focus. With all of our inventions, which are impressive on some levels, we have outsmarted our future. We been able to challenge the limits set in place by nature with our ability to extend life and postpone death.
Anyone not currently in a coma, will observe that the world is experiencing the kind of devastation that can readily be traced to our transgressions of physics, math an ecology. Oh, that my teachers could have found a way to teach physics and math as survival topics. At a young age we would have learned about how we are not all powerful and that our power was, in the end self-destructive.
We cannot blame the uptick in wildfires on the lack of funding for fire fighters, even though that would be beneficial now. We cannot blame the scarcity of water on the earth cycles. We must examine our growth story. What is your growth story? How is your community growing and how is it impacting your life? Does it feel good to see all of those high-rises appear in your city? Do you like the added noise and traffic? Do you like the constant construction of roads and buildings? Do you like going into a section of town and not recognizing it do to its development? Do like all of the water bans now that you have to support more demand? How is wildlife impacted in your growth story? Are you seeing more or less birds in your neighborhood?
Growth is created in two ways, more births than deaths inspired by our total fertility rates ( number of offspring per woman) and in some countries like the US, by immigration. Our growth story should send shivers down our nearly 8 billion spines. It would have been great if my math teachers would have taught us about the impact of the exponential function as Dr. Al Bartlett lamented so often in his overpopulation lectures.
We have extended lifespans and eliminated many causes of death. We have made multiple and premature births successful too. All of that has added up to a problem many choose not to face. When those of us who do understand its threat to humanity’s future try to discuss this issue. we are thrown under the bus. But as anti-human as it seems, it is really the most pro-human of narratives, for to be anti-growth is this day and age is to be pro-humanity.
Now we face a newer threat, the threat that countries which have been able to reduce their total fertility rate, albeit and higher than sustainability population, are now growing by immigration. This undermines their ability to become sustainable and contributes to everything from water scarcity to traffic increases. What happens when people from low carbon footprint countries come and live in the developed world? The net gain of global carbon emissions goes up, hurting us all.
Physics, if taught in a way that we would have all understood, would have made it clear that we cannot keep adding people, no matter what their ethnicity, to our limited country. Learning how to pay well for jobs that need to be done is a much more sustainable path than believing Americans are permanently helpless and need to accommodate more growth in their neighborhoods for those who have come here to fill vacant positions.
Ecology, if taught properly, would have educated us about how we treat animals and plants lower on the food chain is critical to our livelihood. If it is all about people, it won’t be about people at all. If zoning laws run over open space to create more housing, wildlife will suffer. Natural fires will have no place to go except into our living rooms. If water is diverted for irrigation for crops that are sold overseas, we will be following the global growth story down its unsustainable rabbit hole. Sure there is money in growth, for the moment and for the few, until we look around and see that valuing the earth and its limited resources was what had the most value of all.