Does the sight of a large bulldozer send shivers down your spine? Does your heart skip a beat when you see that new high-rise popping up in your neighborhood? Do the traffic increases that can’t be explained away by construction zones and accidents give you sleepless nights? Do you feel nauseous at ribbon cutting ceremonies? Then you just might be a Growth-a-Phobe. I know I suffer from GAP. I am deeply fearful of our runaway human numbers and our love affair with growing our cities and sprawling over land which used to be for wildlife.
According to a quick Internet search, A phobia is “an overwhelming and debilitating fear of an object, place, situation, feeling or animal.” “Phobias are more pronounced than fears. They develop when a person has an exaggerated or unrealistic sense of danger about a situation or object.” Most phobias harm just the individual and their immediate families. Deep fear often causes them to become reclusive. Some, as in homophobia, have the power to harm entire groups of innocent people and should be shunned. The only thing incorrect about being growthphobic is that the sense of danger is very real and dangerous to all living things.
Growth, as the writer Edward Abbey once said, is the philosophy of a cancer cell. Growth, love of growth, promotion of growth in America has set us up for doing just that, and we have become a parasite eating our host. It is a narrative that ties new, bigger, shinier, and better to progress. Politicians run on the promise of new growth. At the promise of new malls, wider freeways, bigger downtowns, new dams for our rivers, we all run, well maybe walk, to the ballot box to usher in their power to take our tax dollars and steal from the earth. It is a story that doesn’t end well and until more catch the GAP, those of us who have it will wake up each day in more and more frustration.
All construction, all technology, all additional people take resources which are polluting during extraction, use and disposal. The earth has become a dumping ground for both our needs and our insatiable desire for new toys. Nature does have the ability to recycle some waste and renew with regrowth but not at our rate of consumption and not at the size of our population. Those two are inseparable and the time is overdue for debating which is worse. In the process of becoming the force of 8 billion, and still growing by 80 million/year, we are also raising the temperature of the earth. In 2022 our carbon rate is still growing at 412 ppm (parts per million) a level of carbon so high we are becoming an inferno of heat, drought and wildfires creating great instability in our food and water supplies.
Still we haven’t changed our tune. Some of our leaders and the big polluters who fund them still deny the very possibility that all of the exhausts from our vehicles and factories trapped in our atmosphere since the 1800’s are to blame for climate change. Our leaders and their minions still operate within the cult of infinite growth as though there will be no price to pay. Growth of our numbers is so silenced by the powers that be, that people are shocked when they hear how quickly our population has exploded. When I tell them that when my parents were born we had less that 3 billion people on earth and only 106 million people in the US, it seems impossible that our species with all of our wars, diseases and maladies could take over the planet so quickly.
Money and power are as addictive as heroin and crack cocaine and just as dangerous. Although many, like Herman Daly who recently wrote in the New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/07/18/magazine/herman-daly-interview.html have offered alternatives to growth in his steady state economy proposal years ago, few are listening. They are sent to the back of the room, swept under the rug by those who worship their portfolios and just can’t see a way forward under a de-growth scenario. They can’t fathom that water is more valuable than a vault full of gold.
Commercials let us know that Wall Street wants us to keep shopping with their offers 0 % financing for shiny new SUV’s, and the latest smart phones go on sale and their salivating customers prove they are becoming smarter than us. Offered in a myriad of new colors they sell us on the notion that the newest phones must be purchased immediately if we are to be on top of the newest technology. When the resources they consume and the pollution they cause are an environmental travesty. https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/science/environment/the-hidden-environmental-toll-of-smartphones/
Solutions to curbing our growth addiction have been readily available for decades. But endless bickering has been throwing a monkey wrench into much needed intelligent and biosphere- focused conversations. Fingers are pointed back and forth between the rich and poor countries, when all are harmed by growing human numbers and their demands on limited resources.
I witnessed this in the 28 years I was in charge of a small 150-acre nature center surrounded by a growing urban area. Every time a high-rise went up across the street or a lane was added to our bordering freeway, our wetland had to take on the extra storm water.
I stood firm on not allowing deep holes to be dug in our prairie, and pointed out the fallacy of thinking we could keep taking on more and more acres in our watershed without consequences. In spite of my efforts, over 2,000 acres were added over the years, and the center’s 3 miles of trails kept flooding especially on high rainfall years. It was my initiation into the downsides of growth. There was no full cost accounting of the development projects, especially the federal funding of freeway ‘improvements’. Oh, they would throw a few dollars our way but was never enough to cover the long-term costs of the damage done by growths evil ways.
There are three basic solutions which must be worked on simultaneously and in each and every country, developed or developing. 1) Work towards a steady state economy, (see https://steadystate.org/ .2) Strive for normalizing small families and providing accessible reproductive health care and education for women (see any number of NGO’s like population media center https://www.populationmedia.org and https://fairstartmovement.org/ 3) and working on the policies which would address the sustainable limits to mass immigration (see www.numbersusa.com and Sustainable Population Australia https://population.org.au/) for this is the fastest way to stop localized, country based growth in its tracks. But these answers which have proven track records in several countries are thrown under the bus because we continue to be married to our toxic growth story and get mired down in downstream distractions and accusations of injustice.
When our global culture, led by the developed world, believes in the infinity of resources and the glory of growth, there is no need to even try these solutions on for size. Just imagine if de-growthers were in charge, we would get busy taking our foot off the growth pedal and working to align our demands with the capacity of the earth to support us. Just think of the resources we would save, the wild animals who could still have a chance and the human suffering we would prevent not to mention money we would save in red ribbons. I wrote extensively about the need to change our narratives in my latest book from Freethought House Press, Change Our Stories Change Our World (2019) But I did specifically suggest just how we go about poking holes in our unsustainable stories. So how do we proceed from a growth-based GNP overpopulated world which operates on an unsustainable scale to one that heads us in a direction of less?
To do this I think we need to take a page out of two books, full of adaptable advice. Woke Racism, How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America (2021) by John McWorter and How to Have Impossible Conversations by Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay (2019). These authors roll up their sleeves and encourage us to take on dominant narratives. McWorter profoundly states, “There is room in society for speaking the truth and living to tell about it.” He gives many examples of where we can say no to the dominant forces and come out ahead. What do Chicago, New York City and Hawaii all have in common? They have all said no to allowing Walmart to come in using a variety of legal strategies. Growth and its negative impacts are not inevitable, but they do take a lot of energy to fight.
When I read the Impossible Conversations book, I immediately thought it had value in showing us how to decouple our world from the growth train. Their advice would be to address growth-based belief system believers respectfully and with deep concern. Those who are promoting growth really do believe they are making the world a better place. It our task to break open that story and expose it for the ecological nightmare that it is. We have to have this seemingly impossible conversation with our leaders and the media. In order to intervene in the growth narrative, Boghossian/Lindsay invite us to poke holes in their story by asking direct questions about their beliefs and then ask them at to put their opinions on a scale of how much they believe their convictions. Then the next key question is to ask; What would it take for you to change your beliefs? What kind of evidence would be convincing enough for you to consider changing your mind?
An example directed at city leaders might look like this: Do you believe that the new development in our city will make an improvement in our lives when completed? How will traffic and water consumption be impacted? Are you aware that we are already water stressed? On a scale of 1-10 how strongly do you believe that this project will benefit our city 5 years from now? If they say anything less than 10 there is room for then asking, what kind of evidence would you accept as proof that embracing growth is harmful to our city? It shouldn’t be too difficult from there to provide any number of statistics to demonstrate the growth ship has sailed. https://www.numbersusa.com/msp/numbersusa-sprawl-studies
It sounds cruel, but we truly do need more growth phobic people in our country and the world. I wish I could spread it by not wearing a mask for it is the one phobia which, if acted upon, could help bring us back from the brink of disaster. The only other healthy phobia I would like to infect us with is my phobia of assault weapons, but that is for another essay.