The word "growth" begins to take on its positive connotation from our very early days. My mother used to stand me against the closet door and measure my growth with a ruler and a pencil. As each new line moved ever upward, it was all goodness ... as in "Oh my goodness, how you have grown."
Eventually, it became "What are you going to do with yourself when you grow up?" Still the implication was that eventually I would do something positive, would arrive at a time and place where it all fit and things were all right with the world.
Unfortunately I stopped growing before I could challenge our 6-foot, 7-inch center on the Flagstaff High School basketball team. One career choice eliminated due to a lack of growth.
When I eventually got into the business world, it was still all about growth. How were we to grow the business? We measured our progress as growth in earnings per share, in the stock price and our own success in the growth of our bank accounts or its reflection in conspicuous consumption.
The idea that growth is good is even reinforced by our architecture that measures achievement in terms, not of usability or aesthetic appeal, but simply in of how many feet does it reach into the sky. So, skylines grow, ever larger but somehow less romantic unless you have been reading Ayn Rand.
Even our biggest crooks, like Bernie Madoff, create Ponzi schemes that seem to grow their investor's wealth while only enriching the schemer. It might be understandable if it had only been Madoff, but his is only one in a long string of acts of greed.
It is almost axiomatic that a politician must bow before the gods of growth. Republicans will tell you that we have to reduce taxes so the economy can grow. The Obama administration tells you that they will stimulate the economy so that the economy can grow.
According to Bloomberg News Service, Obama told them that "If we are growing at a robust rate, then we can pay for the government that we need without having to raise taxes."
This is exactly the situation that we have in California where both our state and local governments rely on the fees related to growth and the taxation that they will bring in the future to pay for the services that we currently demand of our government.
The writer Edward Abbey reminded us that "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer." Abbey was accused of being many things: a desert anarchist, an environmentalist, a gadfly, arrogant, self-centered, bigoted, a national treasure. What he did do was to chronicle the overwhelming urge we have to dominate the untamed American West and to use whatever is there to fuel our need to grow.
It should not be the automatic goal of our government to grow the economy nor should it be the goal of government to continue growing. Just as a cancer will eventually take all of our energy to sustain its insatiable expansion, so growing government will eventually take all of our monetary resources and growing the economy will eventually take all of our natural resources. The end result of all of this will be collapse and possibly the death of our civilization.
This continual chasing the chimera of growth is an economic Ponzi scheme and we are reaping the consequences. Coupled with a legislature that cannot compromise, the collapse was inevitable.
There are alternative visions of the future that need to be considered. They are based not on growth, but rather the idea of sustainability. We need to be planning not for today, or tomorrow, but to start asking the questions of what type of world we are going to leave for our grandchildren.
One part of that effort comes from the Center for a Sustainable Economy.
For example, they seek not to figure out how much money can be made by clear cutting our redwoods, but rather provides the framework for analyzing the net public benefit of forest restoration.
California's current Legislature is locked in battle between two un-bending political policies, Republicans who take vows to never, ever allow a new tax and Democrats who insist that they need to pay for providing a social safety net for the public. Both work for and rely on a continued pattern of growth as if that were progress.
It is time that we seek solutions elsewhere. For the economy, we need to make sustainability our goal, rather than growth. We need not to be doing more, but to focus our energies on doing better. For politics, only the Green Party makes sustainability a part of their platform. It is time to think of our future, one where, as Thomas Friedman wrote, "Green is the new Red, White and Blue."
Wes Rolley is a Morgan Hill artist and concerned citizen. He is Co-Chairman of the EcoAction Committee, Green Party.
Wes Rolley Wes Rolley is an artist and concerned citizen. The Board of Contributors is comprised of local writers whose views appear on Tuesdays and Fridays.
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