Society always sustained itself locally, until the industrial revolution, when an inexorable march began toward bigger, centralized economies. In Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, Bill McKibben says relentless growth is now ruining the globe; maintenance of wealth and resources, instead of expansion, must be society's new driver, or it will perish. Here staff editor Mark Fischetti questions his assertions.
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN: Your basic message is that humankind must give up growth as its modus operandi. Why can't we just grow more smartly?
McKIBBEN: We can certainly do things more efficiently, and we should. But that's not enough. We are finally hitting the limits to growth that people have talked about since the 1970s, and we are seeing staggering environmental changes. Few people have come to grips with that.
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SA: Is absolute, zero growth necessary, or would “very slight” growth be sustainable?
McKIBBEN: I'm not a utopian. I don't have any schema for where the world should come to rest. A specific number is not part of the analysis. I'm more interested in trajectories: what happens if we move away from growth as the answer to everything and head in a different direction. We've been so engrossed in the growth experiment that we've tried very little else. We can measure society by other means. Some countries measure satisfaction. If we measure the world in other ways, individual accumulation of wealth becomes less important.
SA: The subtext here is that large, centralized, monolithic systems of agriculture, energy and other commerce drive growth. Are you saying big is bad?
McKIBBEN: We built things big because it allowed for faster growth. Efficiencies were gained through size. That's not what we need now. We don't need a racehorse that is exquisitely bred to go as fast as possible but whose ankle breaks the minute there's a divot in the track. We need a plow horse built for durability. Durability needs to be our mantra, instead of expansion.
SA: Is sheer size the culprit, or is it the complexity that size brings? You say that not just banks but more basic industries are “too big to fail.” Should such institutions be broken up or disentangled somehow?
McKIBBEN: The financial system, the energy system and the agricultural system share great similarities: a very small number of players, incredibly interwoven. In each case, cascading effects occur when something goes wrong; a chicken pot pie spreads botulism to 48 states. My house runs on solar panels. If it fails, I have a problem, but it doesn't shut down the eastern U.S. power grid.
SA: So you're advocating a return to local reliance. But since E. F. Schumacher's 1973 book, Small Is Beautiful, dedicated people have been trying to implement local food and energy systems around the world, yet many regions are still struggling. How small is “local”?
McKIBBEN: We'll figure out the size. It could be a town, a region, a state. But to find the answer, we have to get the incredibly distorting subsidies out of our current systems. They send all kinds of bad signals about what we should be doing. In energy we've underwritten fossil fuel for a long time. It's even more egregious in agriculture. Once subsidies wither, we can figure out what scale of industry makes sense.
SA: Don't local products cost more?
McKIBBEN: We would have more farms, and they might be more labor-intensive, but that would also create more jobs, and the farmer would reap more of the revenue. Economically, local farms cut out many middlemen. Buying vegetables from CSA [community-supported agriculture] farms is the cheapest way to get food. Meat might still be more expensive, but frankly, eating less meat isn't the end of the world. The best news in my book is the spread, in the past few years, of all kinds of smart, technologically adept, small-scale agricultural techniques around the developing world.
SA: It sounds like the key to local agriculture, at least, is to teach people how to raise yields, without more fertilizer....
McKIBBEN: Yes, and it depends on where you are. There will not be one system that spreads across the entire world, the way we've tried to spread industrial, synthetic fertilizer-based agriculture. The solutions are much smarter than that. Instead of spreading chemicals, which causes all kinds of problems, we are figuring out alternative methods and how to spread them.
SA: Okay, even if local agriculture works, how does that support durability instead of growth?
McKIBBEN: Probably the most important assets we can have for long-term stability, especially in an era of ecological upheaval, are good soils—soils that allow you to grow a good amount of food, that can absorb a lot of water because rainfalls are steadily increasing, soils that hold that rainfall through the kinds of extended droughts that are becoming more common. Good soil is precisely what lowimpact, low-input, local agriculture builds, and precisely what industrial agriculture destroys.
SA: Local reliance sounds attractive, but how do countries like the U.S. get out of huge debt without growing? The U.S. Treasury Department says the only painless solution is growth. Do we need a transition period where growth eliminates debt, and then we embrace durability?
McKIBBEN: Well, “painless” is just delay. You know: “Pay me now, or pay me later.” The primary political question is: Can we make change happen fast enough to avoid all-out collapses that are plausible, even likely? How do we move these transitions more quickly than they want to move?
SA: What is the most important action to take first?
McKIBBEN: Change the price of energy to reflect the damage it does to the environment. If fossil fuel reflected that cost, we'd see these new systems and transitions happening much more rapidly. A cap on carbon that raises its price is sine qua non for getting anything done.
SA: A price on carbon is a tough sell....
McKIBBEN: There's no easy way out of the trouble we're in. But the world we're capable of creating has redeeming qualities, including a much stronger sense of community and a closer connection to other people... as well as to the natural world. We have assiduously traded community for consumption for a long time. Since the end of World War II, the U.S. has focused on building bigger houses that are farther apart. That has destroyed community. The average American has half as many close friends as individuals had 50 years ago. It's no wonder that by every measure, we are less happy with our lives, even though our material standard of living has trebled. That insight makes it possible to imagine the kind of change we need. Giving up growth for durability will not be all loss. There will be some loss, and there will be some gain.
