Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jeanstimmell.blogspot.com.

The sky is falling, cried the media last week. Headlines blared that China’s population has started declining and will shrink precipitately by 2100. India will soon follow, and the U.S. population will be falling by 2050. According to the initial coverage by mainstream news outlets, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, this degrowth will wreak havoc on the world economy.

Funny how things change.

Fifty years ago, the opposite scenario was unfolding: the news was sounding the alarm about the dangers of an increasing population. The Population Bomb, a best-selling book published in 1968, predicted that “unless humanity cut down its numbers – soon – all of us would face “mass starvation” on “a dying planet.”

Then, in 1972, the Club of Rome released a report called The Limits to Growth, co-authored by Donella Meadows, an environmental scientist who taught at Dartmouth for 29 years and occasionally wrote My Turn pieces for the Monitor. This treatise, selling over 30 million copies, provided hard evidence showing how population growth would soon exceed the earth’s carrying capacity leading to environmental collapse.

Needless to say, these predictions did not materialize in the short term because of advancements in agriculture and the fact that as more folks entered the middle class, they chose to have fewer children.

However, fifty years later, we are now clearly feeling the pain. The consequences of continual growth don’t lead to a quick ending like being wiped out by a bomb, but to a gradual wasting away like being consumed by a slow-moving cancer. This process is well underway.

According to the Convention on Biological Diversity, “Every day up to 150 species are lost forever to extinction driven by human activity due to the unsustainable use of land, water, and energy use.” Each day, ever more CO2 is being pumped into the atmosphere further worsening our climate change crisis. The people of the world are desperate. According to the World Bank, almost half the world’s population lives in poverty, struggling to meet basic needs.

Against this backdrop, no growth sounds like a superior alternative, providing, as it does, life-saving, long-term benefits to humans and the entire natural world. Perhaps the mainstream media ignored the potentially positive aspects of degrowth because it goes against America’s fundamental mantra — growth is good, regardless of the human and environmental costs.

That explains why America has remained in denial about climate change for all these years, until recently when we are getting clobbered by catastrophic storms. And so it is with our obsession with our ‘bigger is better’ philosophy. We refuse to buy into the long-term benefits of post-growth, getting stuck instead with the negative, short-term economic costs that benefit only Wall Street and politicians telling fibs to get reelected.

Whether we like it or not, a declining population accompanied by a no-growth economy is coming. Experts call it ‘post-growth.’ If we stay in denial, the transition will, indeed, wreak havoc on our economy. Our only hope is to start planning. It would have been preferable to begin fifty years ago when Donella Meadows co-wrote Limits to Growth. But it’s never too late to start.

In a recent New York Times column, Paul Krugman suggests some practical, common-sense policies to smooth the road to degrowth. To begin with, we have to address the enormous economic challenge we face as our population continues to age, producing fewer working-age people and more elderly ones.

First and foremost, we must accept more immigrants into our country, who, by paying taxes, help keep the government afloat while producing goods and services or caring for our increasingly elderly population, thereby strengthening our economy. Second, we must improve pensions because folks are living longer. And, last, we must enhance healthcare because “an aging population has much less impact if people remain healthy well into old age.”

Degrowth does not have to be financially painful. Advocates like Tim Jackson, an ecological economist, and the entrepreneur and visionary Peter Barnes have devised various innovative ways to pay for policies like this without raising taxes. Vedran Horvát reminds us that the word for degrowth in his native Croatian language has a positive connotation.

“It means to grow up and be mature. So, we need to be mature enough to cooperate and identify a definite set of options to ensure the survival of future generations.”

The alternative is to keep our heads buried in the sand. Or, in our case, buried in an icy snow drift, getting deeper every day.

]]>