System fails people, planet
Toolbox
Published: February 12, 2009
Our current growth-oriented economic system is failing people and the earth and it is time to move to a different economic model — a steady state economy.
The top 10 percent of the U.S. population now control about 70 percent of the wealth and 13 percent live below the poverty level. In the meantime the meek are inheriting an earth that features child slavery, sweatshops, a billion hungry people, dried up rivers, depleting aquifers, vanishing forests, dead seas and collapsed fisheries, melting glaciers, and wars over resources. The greed oriented growth economy conflicts with the laws of physics and ecology and the values of basic human fairness and the responsibility we have for each other.
It is highly unlikely that the recovery plans being proposed will solve our economic problems in the long run. In the 1930's, when we were recovering from the first great depression, the U.S. population was about 125 million, and we had plenty of natural capital to work with such as land to grow more food, cheap fossil fuels and other resources to make goods for consumption. Now the population is over 300 million and we are running out of these resources.
We need to move instead to steady state economy where population size is stabilized and the consumption of resources and the resulting pollution remain at fairly constant levels that can be handled by our ecosystems. This type of economy is promoted by the Center for the Advancement of a Steady State Economy (www.steadystate.org) and the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont.
Let's use this time of economic and environmental crisis to rethink how one is related to the other and to begin to move to a system that will better meet our human needs as well as the needs of the planet.
George Plumb
Washington
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