How We Grew Into Growth

There is a trend in our society to believe that bigger is better. Just in my lifetime, just shy of fifty years, I’ve seen buildings get bigger, vehicles get bigger, cities get bigger, soda cups get bigger, and, of course, the population got bigger. While some of us view a lot of this “progress” as shameful, there is still a large contingent of people who see growth as the highest goal, especially when it comes to what we call the “economy”.

“In the world we grew up in,” Bill McKibben reminds us in his book Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, “our most ingrained economic and political habit was growth; it’s the reflex we’re going to have to temper, and it’s going to be tough.”

As it turns out, bigger is not always better, and growth is not always optimal. As Don Hall, co-director of Transition US, recently explained to me, we love to see our children grow and reach adulthood, but imagine if, after they made it through their adolescent growth spurt, they just kept on growing. In other words, growth is only optimal to a certain point. If humans reach a point of not growing in order to live out their lives, we should model our economy after the reality we experience, rather than the appetites we’ve created.

“In our current economic system,” says Daneil Pinchbeck in How Soon is Now: From Personal Initiation to Global Transformation, “profit is generated by ever-increasing commercial activity. Because it is based on debt and inherently unstable, our economic system must grow constantly just to maintain itself. Our…