Bill McKibben on the Idea of Growth

In a Mother Jones article, "Reversal of Fortune," Bill McKibben, author of the landmark book, The Death of Nature, argues that the time has come to quit "aiming for growth at all costs and hoping it will trickle down." McKibben claims that "idea" of growth was invented by Lyndon Johnson, since before World War II, people like FDR talked about the American economy as mature and seemed to think it might not continue to grow. Evidently, the Great Depression doesn't seem relevant to this story, since McKibben makes no mention of it.

McKibben also echoes the popular green idea that capitalism and socialism are equally dedicated to the "dogma" of economic growth, noting that LBJ "wasn't alone in thinking this way. From Moscow, Nikita Khrushchev thundered, 'Growth of industrial and agricultural production is the battering ram with which we shall smash the capitalist system.'" The problem here is that economic growth isn't a faulty doctrine or mistaken priority; it's a structural necessity for both private and state capitalist economies, especially when they are locked into competition for control of the planet.

But McKibben is right when he observes that growth doesn't make most people happier. He cites a number of surveys of "life satisfaction" showing that, during the last half century, as real per capita income has increased in the US, the percentage of people who report feeling happy with their lives has declined.

For McKibben, the culprit is individualism, the habit of seeking self-fulfillment through the pursuit of wealth and consumer goods. Life in affluent societies isolates people from each other, when "we seem to be genetically wired for community." So, he argues, we need to localize our lives, disconnecting ourselves from the global growth economy by doing things like buying food and goods produced near where we live, "working on regional-scale sustainable timber projects," and "building energy networks that work like the Internet by connecting solar rooftops and backyard windmills in robust mini-grids." Not only will doing so be good for the environment, it will connect us to the kinds of communities that can give us real satisfaction.

But individualism isn't a way of life that people simply choose; it's a backwards way of talking about how capitalist labor markets force workers into a competition of all against all. And while well-meaning networks of environmentalists can achieve truly inspiring feats of green innovation and solidarity, what they can't do is prevent global capitalism from destroying the natural systems on which their local economies and communities depend.