Discover more from Douglass’s Newsletter
Industrial growth to green growth.
This can replace the language of degrowth. Green growth is attractive while degrowth is threatening.
Sequestering through growth is the only plausible path to cutting the co2 already in the atmosphere. As we know, if we were to stop all co2 into the air now, what remains would continue to heat the earth toward unlivability for most people and species,.
In thinking about plausible futures, for a long time I have had the view that gardening was an attractive alternative world. I was very attracted to the Arts and Crafts movement (think of Ruskin, Morris, Mumford, Maybeck and on to Sennett) which created modest but attractive spaces for living and growing in the context of a culture more arts centered than industrial.
With the passing of time I have come to think of the shift from manufacturing to growing as essential. Not toward industrial agriculture, but planting green close to home, or moving the families out to the growing fields. It seems to me we need to move from an industrial economy to a green economy where green means plants and biology, not mining and manufacturing with co2 producing "green energy" (solar panels and wind turbines have to be manufactured). Those who want clean green energy rather than green growing want to keep the current economy growing. The math does not work out. There is no clean energy economy that does not require fossil fuel use, if all the externalities (avoided by the economists) are taken into account.
The problem is not scarcity of energy it is the reverse: too much.
A green economy is economic activity on the land, some already growing food, much of it not, as in lawns, golf courses. And of course parking lots and feeder roads. All these could be repurposed toward green if we face our food water and shelter crises for the threat thy are.
John Locke talked about land as seizeable by anyone who found land not productive but to which they could add their time and effort. They then had the right to claim it as their own for use. This is not collectivization but shift to productive use by whomever. It means redistribution from larger unused to smaller used portions of land.
What kind of legislation would further the transition to such a green plant based rather than industrial economy? How about serious land reform, where any land - as in Locke's view - not being used for food can be repurposed for the green growth economy. I see this as repurposing for Gardenworld, green that is both food growing, habitat for people and attractive. Difficult, but the alternatives?