I had a fascinating conversation last week with Jonathan Mille about how vulnerable systems respond to risk, and how to make our human society more resilient to the inevitable climate shocks. Throughout the conversation, Jonathan flagged that most people, even in decision-making spaces, are totally unaware of the real impact our insistence on economic growth has on the environment due to the language tricks and narratives that appear to divorce humankind’s activity from the biosphere—with devastating consequences.

Economic growth is the drum banged on both sides of the aisle while some of us in the wings question exactly what we’re marching towards. Touted as the cure all for all ills, from poverty to the climate crisis, modern societies subsist on the assumption that health economies get infinitely bigger (despite increasing evidence that such growth only results in inequitable pieces of the pie growing, not more being shared around). But what is growing exactly? And what is feeding the economy in order for it to grow?

These are legitimate questions which economists tend to ignore, employing wild doublethink that economies both are as real as the material world and also do not depend on the material world to survive. Economies are merely ways of human organisation, unlimited in their potential diversity, and compromised only by humankind’s lack of integrity and crisis of creativity. However, as systems, economies follow the same rules as anything else—growing demands energy, and energy cannot be created or destroyed, but is only ever transformed. 

This is why we can map GDP growth on top of energy consumption. Our imaginary economy has literal material demands in order to exist. Money might exist only in our minds but generating wealth demands the input of resources. It’s like razing a forest to print money: the trees had to be logged, the wood pulped and the paper printed to be transformed into cash. Even though most money now exists in binary code on computers (weakening our understanding of how intrinsically linked it is to the physical world even further) the process is always the same. Digital wealth generation comes from transforming physical resources.

What a sad state of affairs. This wonderful planet of ours, home to everyone and everything, is sectioned off into private money-making facilities; the riches awarded to every living creature are stolen to be transformed into private tokens that accumulate on digital ledgers, offering the wealthiest the opportunity to further destroy and pollute the planet we depend upon. This is the law of capitalism; the exponential bulldozing of one’s own limits.

Besides using technology to bypass one’s limits, another key resource is your fellow human. One man on his own will only be able to take care of a handful of fields; one man with a plough some more; one man overseeing hundreds of men benefits from the labour of those hundreds of men, suddenly reaping the rewards of owning land far beyond the limits of his physical capacity. This is why, despite the economies of the global north recovering since the financial crash of 2008, people’s lives are getting worse: the money is rushing to the top, not the bottom. The manpower, creativity, time and care of the exploited is transformed into wealth by those who then refuse to increase the wages of their workers. This is the violent reality of the economy—wealth in and of itself may be a notion, but its alchemy is material. Turning the real into the illusory demands energy; we’re turning Eden into a hellscape.

The limits to growth are confined to the material world and our own labour, but the limits to the wealth it can generate are disappearing into the columns of 0s and 1s which govern the virtual reality we deem more precious than the air we breathe, the food we eat, the land we rest upon. Billionaires can only exist in a world where we don’t have to count gold coins to prove it, just as they can only exist in a world with technological firepower and exponentially growing manpower. This is a world where exploitation passes for innovation, where daylight robbery passes for business. This is a world of suffering and flames, slaving under a master who governs those whose morality crumbled under the pressure of their own desires. This a world without limits.

Welcome to Hell.

© Rachel Donald

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