Nothing Grows Forever

So why do we expect our economy to?

New degrowth mascot, your future seafood, or both?

Photo by Joel Filipe on Unsplash

Our current global economic system expects continuous growth. Our governments set targets for GDP growth, knowing that everyone is happy if they grow the pie a little bit each year. With a little more growth each year, people have a little more money, they can buy a few more possessions to make them happy. Stock prices will on average go up, which makes shareholders happy.

The only problem is that such a system assumes growth forever on a planet with finite resources that has already passed the danger zone on 6 of 9 planetary boundaries.

If the global economy grows just 2% per year, the global economy doubles in 35 years. Where are the resources going to come from to double the economy every 35 years? And if you do find those resources, that is going to make our environmental problems, including climate change, much worse than they are today.

Imagine a world economy that has doubled in the next 35 years, with the increased material and energy use that requires. That world will require more food to feed more people. That will require more phosphorus and nitrogen that will run off into our water. That world will be hotter, with less water, more destructive storms, more famine, and many more refugees. That world will have oceans that are dying as ocean acidification destroys the food web. Jellyfish, which can thrive in such oceans, will replace the tuna, cod, and salmon on our current seafood menus. In that world, where GDP doubles in 35 years, show me how we will be better off.   

That math doesn’t exist.

If we double our resources in the next 35 years, our already overstretched climate, land, and water systems will collapse in many places.

Nothing is meant to grow forever.

The phrase "trees don't grow to the sky" comes from the German proverb Die Bäume wachsen nicht in den Himmel, which translates to "no trees grow into the sky". The proverb originated in the early 16th century and teaches that there are natural limits to growth and improvement.

Another great example is … us.

We humans usually stop growing (in height at least) in our late teens. Our brains stop developing in our early to mid-twenties. By our mid-twenties, we are fully cooked. But we still have about 2/3 of our lives ahead of us. We are mature. The rest of our lives don’t involve physical growth. We spend the last 2.3 of our lives maintaining the system.

Economists and politicians might learn a trick from the human condition.

Our global economy as a whole is mature. We don’t need to grow anymore. We need to maintain.

Our economics, our politics, and our goals as a civilization should focus on maintaining what we have. This means heading the alarm bells going off all around us telling us the system will break down if we don’t address those sirens. Instead, we insist on growth, which in the end will shorten the lifespan of our civilization, just as not addressing our health issues as we grow older would eventually lead to our bodies shutting down before their time.

Join the snail revolution.

If you have done any reading on degrowth, and poked around the degrowth literature, you have likely come across a good share of snails.

I’m told that it comes from the writing of Austrian theologian and philosopher Ivan Illich, who wrote:

“A snail, after adding a number of widening rings to the delicate structure of its shell, suddenly brings its accustomed activities to a stop. A single additional ring would increase the size of the shell sixteen times. Instead of contributing to the welfare of the snail, it would burden the creature with such an excess of weight that any increase in its productivity would henceforth be literally outweighed by the task of coping with the difficulties created by enlarging the shell beyond the limits set by its purpose. At that point, the problems of overgrowth begin to multiply geometrically, while the snail’s biological capacity can be best extended arithmetically.”

Illich emphasis on limits and boundaries in the discussion on degrowth drives home the point that technological wizardry, or green growth, won’t save us. We are already past the threshold flashing danger. To push further forward with green energy just to keep our current economic system going is foolish if not madness.

So, those thoughts from Illich, as well as the message of “slowing down” that we get from pictures of snails is why you see:

This from degrowth.info:

This from the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University:

Or this from some jerk who used AI to create a cute snail picture for a blog post:

If you google “degrowth” and “snail” you will find a lot of adorable snail pictures.

You can keep your association of snails with degrowth. I won’t take that away from you. But I think I might have found another way to help explain degrowth to people.

Lobbying for a change to the degrowth mascot.

I’m fine with the snail as the degrowth mascot and Illich’s beautiful writing helps support the image of a snail perfectly summing up the ethic of degrowth.

But I recently came across something that I think gives us another way to frame the degrowth story. Analogies are great storytelling mechanisms, so telling someone “trees don’t grow to the sky”, or “we all stop growing when we are mature”, or “the snail sets limits on its own growth”, are wonderful ways to help people understand why we need to consider degrowth.  

But there is one other fascinating example in nature to talk about.

Meet the jellyfish Turritopsis dohrnii.

These small jellyfish can turn back time by reverting to an earlier stage of their life cycle.

The life cycle of Turritopsis dohrnii. Image adapted from: Australian Academy of Science

A jellyfish begins life as a fertilized egg, then becomes a larval planula. The planula needs to connect to a surface where it can develop into a polyp. These polyps grow and eventually can form a bud that breaks off and can grow into an ephyra (a small jellyfish) and develop into a medusa (an adult jellyfish).

The Turritopsis dornii has developed an amazing life hack. When it faces an environmental stressor, such as injury or lack of food, it can revert back to a polyp and start over without dying. It is the same organism; it has just gone back to an earlier stage of development so that it can grow again and continue the process.

It is unlikely that any of these special jellyfish will live forever. They still face predators, and environmental stressors may be too great for them to deal with – even with their neat magic trick.

But they do tell us that when we face environmental stressors that are clearly too much for us, the correct action is to retreat and live to fight another day. Pushing forward in the face of stressors that will further harm us is a foolhardy choice when the choice of survival is the obvious path to choose.

Maybe we aren’t smarter than a simple jellyfish.

Which is why it may be the only seafood on the menu in the not-too-distant future.