Slow growth forces transition to post-growth society that adapts to environmental limits.

For almost forty-five years, since the 1972 publication of The Limits to Growth, a sliver of the environmental movement has struggled to frame unending economic growth as a core driver of environmental harm. They argue that an ever-expanding economy generates exponentially increasing pressures on environmental systems that will inevitably carry us beyond the “safe operating space” of the planet. From the depletion of forests and fisheries, to ocean plastic pollution and climate change, it is the staggering growth in the volume of materials extracted, products consumed, and waste produced that brings us to the doorstep of an environmental unraveling. Emergent “green” technologies—renewable energy, polyculture agriculture, decarbonized transportation systems, reduced product packaging, and the like—can blunt these impacts, but not for long, since their ameliorative effects are quickly swamped by the environmental penalty of additional growth. To reap lasting benefits from these technological innovations, we need a suite of parallel social innovations to release us from political and economic systems addicted to growth.2 These arguments have largely fallen on deaf ears. Rather than viewing economic growth as a source of environmental degradation, most see it as essential to sustainability. To them, an ever-expanding economy drives technological innovation while lifting billions out of environmentally destructive poverty. Growth also means more government revenue, which supports ambitious environmental initiatives at no cost to other programs, thus avoiding nasty political conflict. From this vantage point, growth is the solution, not the problem, so long as it is environmentally sound growth. The job of higher education is to train students and to conduct research that produces the technologies and practices that fuel this growth and turns it from “brown” to “green.” For the past few years, this pro-growth logic has been under especially fierce assault by scholars and activists. (See Chapter 20.) One is Boston College sociologist Julie Schor, who calls for a "slow consumption" movement inspired by the push toward "slow food" and writes persuasively about a "plentitude economy" divorced from the growth imperative. Another is economist Richard Norgaard, professor emeritus of energy and resources at the University of California at Berkeley, who likens today's obsession with growth to a modern-day religion built around a disastrous faith. "The economy," Norgaard suggests, "really is the world’s greatest faith-based organization." And Gus Speth, former dean of the prestigious Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, recently wrote that "it is time for Americans to move to a post-growth society, where our communities and families are no longer sacrificed for the sake of mere GDP growth."3 The rough outline of social innovations for this post-growth society is clear. As Speth explains: "[W]e already know the types of policies that move us toward a post-growth economy that sustains both human and natural communities .... [There is] a long list of public policies that would slow GDP growth, thus sparing the environment, while simultaneously improving social and individual well being." Speth's list, which draws on work by numerous scholars, includes shorter workweeks, longer vacations, and more investment in local, small-scale economic enterprises that prosper by staying small. A shift to worker cooperatives and community banking with a strong commitment to social equity and environmental limits also makes the list. So too do progressive taxation policies, seed grants to promote community entrepreneurship, and guarantees for part-time workers."4 Speth's recommendations could easily be dismissed by those unpersuaded by the post-growth argument, except for one glaring reality: for more than a decade, we have been living in the very low-growth world that many dismiss as impossible, hopelessly dismal, or a retreat to some dark age. "Economic growth," explains Neil Irwin of the New York Times, "has been weaker for longer than it has been in the lifetime of most people on Earth." Since 2001, U.S. economic growth per capita rose 0.9 percent a year, almost a 60 percent decline from the 2.2 percent annual increase between 1947 and 2000. Economic growth in Western Europe and Japan has been even lower. Because of a number of still-unclear factors—aging populations, slowing population growth, and the intermittency of economically transformative technologies, among others—there is good reason to expect this tepid growth to continue, with some ups and downs, for the foreseeable future. These will be turbulent times that call for a particular kind of education across colleges and universities. (See Box 16-1.)5 It is tempting to double-down on the economic growth machine by mobilizing multiple forces in society, including higher education, to get us back to the time of 2 percent-plus growth per year. In the short run, this might work, but it ultimately will heighten the conflict between exponential economic growth and the integrity of environmental systems upon which human prosperity rests. Much of this growth, after all, delivers ambiguous benefits, and some of it actively undermines human prosperity. In the end, we will still need to deal with the implications of persistent low- or no-growth—the material base of the economy cannot continue to grow exponentially—with an even more despoiled environment on our hands.6 More important, pining for the "good old days" of robust growth diverts us from the critical task of adjusting, now, to a low-growth world in ways that are just, equitable, democratic, and environmentally restorative. Even if we believed that a return to muscular growth was just a few years away, wouldn't we want to explore how to gracefully adapt to our current conditions, if only as an insurance policy against the possibility that the days of high growth are behind us? Few, if any, of the social innovations described by Speth are inherently anti-growth, so there is little to lose by assessing and spreading them as we are able. For reasons still opaque to economists, slow growth is no longer a fuzzy wish tossed about by environmental scholars. It is here, among us, in our communities, on the ground, affecting our pocketbooks and driving our politics. It is no longer just academic. Rather than treating tepid growth as a problem to be solved ("how do we get the economy growing again?"), higher education can reclaim its beacon of sustainability by attacking an altogether different but immediately relevant question: How do complex human societies thrive— environmentally, equitably, and justly—in a post-growth world?