Challenging Growthism | Reclaiming our Humanity from the Destructive Grip of Mainstream Economics
In this episode, we talk with Dr. Joshua Farley, an expert in ecological economics, about the urgent need to realign our economic systems with ecological and social justice imperatives by reclaiming our humanity from the destructive grip of mainstream economics. Highlights include:
How mainstream economic ideologies disregard planetary boundaries and contribute to ecological damage through unchecked economic growth;
A critique of the ‘Homo economicus’ model in mainstream economics, which inaccurately depicts humans as purely rational, self-interested, competitive, and insatiable, and misrepresents our fundamentally cooperative nature;
Why markets, while suitable for catering to individual tastes and preferences, are wholly inadequate in addressing ecological constraints and achieving secure sufficiency for everyone;
How overpopulation disproportionately benefits the wealthy, driving down wages and inflating the costs of land, food, housing, and other basic necessities.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
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Joshua Farley 0:00
The biggest idea is that we do live on a finite planet that captures a finite amount of energy, which can be used to generate a finite flow of resources. And the most important thing is making sure our economy does not exceed those planetary boundaries. If we have planetary boundaries, then we have finite resources. We've got to pay very close attention to distribution, and we have to be very clear that markets are incapable of solving the problem of ecological sustainability or just distribution. They ignore most of the benefits from nature. They're just treated as free goods. Mainstream economists want to put market prices on those; the irony of what they do is ask what people would be willing to pay. We're relying on individual choice to decide, like how much climate stability we want, or how clean of water we want, and its preferences weighted by purchasing powers. We only care what you have to say if you're rich. You know, those are absurd ideas for solving those problems.
Alan Ware 1:00
That was ecological economist, Dr. Joshua Farley. In this episode of the Overpopulation Podcast, we'll be talking with Joshua about the need to transform our economic systems to align with both ecological realities and more socially just ethics.
Nandita Bajaj 1:24
Welcome to the Overpopulation Podcast, where we tirelessly make ecological overshoot and overpopulation common knowledge. That's the first step in right-sizing the scale of our human footprint, so that it is in balance with life on Earth, enabling all species to thrive. I'm Nandita Bajaj, co-host of the podcast and executive director of Population Balance.
Alan Ware 1:47
I'm Alan Ware, co-host of the podcast and researcher with Population Balance. We are proud to be the first and only nonprofit organization globally that draws the connections between pronatalism, human supremacy, social inequalities, and ecological overshoot. Our mission at Population Balance is to inspire narrative, behavioral, and system change that shrinks our human impact and elevates the rights and wellbeing of people, animals, and the planet. And now on to today's guest. Dr Joshua Farley is an ecological economist, professor in community development, and applied economics fellow at the Gund Institute for Environment at the University of Vermont, and past president of the International Society for Ecological Economics. His broad research interests focus on the design of economic institutions capable of balancing what is biophysically possible with what is socially, psychologically, and ethically desirable. Specific research includes the economics of essential resources, financial and monetary systems for a just and sustainable economy, agroecology and ecosystem services, the commons, and the evolution of cooperation. He is co-author with Herman Daly of Ecological Economics: Principles and Applications. And now on to today's interview.
Nandita Bajaj 3:09
Hi Josh, thanks for coming on our podcast. We're so grateful to be speaking with you today for a number of reasons. You are a broad thinking ecological economist. You're at the leading edge of thinking about the changes humanity needs to make if we hope to have a more ecologically healthy and socially just future. And we're excited to dig into some of your ideas today.
Joshua Farley 3:33
Yeah. Thanks a lot for having me. I look forward to sharing them. It's the reason I do what I do.
Nandita Bajaj 3:26
And we can start with a little bit of just generally about the economy. You've noted in your work that economies are evolved systems. Considering that the global economy today is quite entangled with what's called the polycrisis, a network of interlinked ecological and social crises, can you explain, from an evolutionary perspective, how we have arrived at the current economic system of industrial capitalism?
Joshua Farley 4:07
And I'd say we're a continually evolving system. And just at the very basics, a lot of people have interpreted evolution is this severe competition in which the most fit emerge. But even Darwin noted, and I think it's incredibly obvious, that the fittest individuals often outcompete other individuals within a group, but the fittest group outcompetes other groups. So you have these twin evolutionary forces favoring selfishness at one scale and cooperation at another, and I would strongly argue that cooperation is absolutely what dominates. So we're a eukaryotic species, meaning that our cells have a nucleus. And the original eukaryotic species was a form of cooperation between an archean and a bacteria, two prokaryotic species with no nucleus, that merged. And when they merge in this way, it's what's called a major evolutionary transition in that entities that were originally able to survive on their own, now can only survive cooperatively. And that's very true that our mitochondria cannot survive apart from the rest of our cell. Our cell is the merger of these two. And then our eukaryotic cells, the individual cells, you know, for billions of years, were individuals. They figured out how to come together as an organism. And again, what we have is one of our cells cannot possibly survive apart from our body. And humans actually have come together as organisms into a social organism, where we've gone another major evolutionary transition - a human can't survive apart from the human collective. And so I would argue this cooperation has dominated evolutionary history, and humanity's success owes to our capacity for cooperation. And sadly mainstream economics has latched onto this idea of self-interested competition and argues that everything should focus on our own self interest. And again, within the group, the selfish individuals often outcompete other individuals, but the group itself suffers. The whole ecosystem has also evolved together. We evolved into an ecosystem adapted to the conditions created by all the others. So humans can't survive separate from the ecosystem. No species can survive separate from the ecosystem. So what we have right now is an economy, and this partly goes back to the Enlightenment and to Descartes. Descartes looked at the separation of humans from nature, mind from body. He figured the rational mind and soul are innate to humans, but not present in other species. So other species have no more moral standing than machinery. They're there for us to be used for our benefit. They're just objects to be harvested as we need to contribute to our welfare with no understanding that we evolved collectively. We depend upon them for our survival.
And, you know if you think about it, what is the relationship you want between a cell in your body and your body? You know, would you want your cell in your body to be looking at how we can harvest whatever it takes from your organism for its own benefit? No, obviously, we want the cell in our body to put the survival of our body ahead of its own survival. The optimal member of society is, you know, John Kennedy said, Ask not what your society can do for you, but what you can do for your society. I really believe the only relationship between humans and the rest of nature that's going to allow us to survive for, you know, another 750,000 years to give us the average life expectancy of a million species of a million years, is if we understand that our relationship to nature should be the same as the cell to the body. We should take the minimum necessary for our own survival and recognize that we've got to contribute to the survival of the entire system. And I think mainstream economics has this completely backward. It really just looks at how we can maximize the monetary value of nature, not understanding we depend on it for our survival. And I think that this basic attitude of humans as separate from and superior to the rest of nature, as nature at our service, as nature just a collection of objects rather than a communion of subjects, as Thomas Berry would say, a noted environmental thinker. You know we really have to look at ourselves as one part of a collective system, and our survival depends on that system, just as much as the survival of one of our cells depends on the survival of our body, or the survival of an individual human depends on the survival of society.
Nandita Bajaj 8:40
We've had people like Riane Eisler on the show who've talked about, you know, how there's so much evidence, within our history and our pre-history of this cooperation value - that partnership has been much more dominant than dominator hierarchies or competition. And the fact that you've tied that with the economic model is quite refreshing, because you're bringing the social and the ethical value of the human into looking at how an economy can embody some of those values, rather than the individuated objects that we've kind of been made to become.
Joshua Farley 9:24
I often start my classes by asking my students what type of economic system they grew up in. And inevitably they'll say, oh, capitalism or neoliberalism. And I'll say, Oh, your parents charged you room and board. And I say, No, you were raised in a gifting and reciprocity economy, which I consider the core economy, where the principles are caring and love and fairness. And I stress that in that type of economy, if somebody gives you a gift that's so thoughtful and so meaningful and they put so much into it, and you gave them something, you know, simple and not very important, you actually feel really bad. You feel like, oh, boy, I really want to reciprocate. I want to do something for that person. And that's the fairness part and the caring. Whereas in a capitalist economy, if you go to the store and you've been looking to get, like, a new coat or something, and you find one that's 80% off, and you know there's no way anybody could have gotten a fair wage to do that or that the ecological cost of that item clearly exceed the price, you're still delighted. Oh, wow. And in a monetary economy, we want to take as much as possible at the lowest cost. And in a fairness and caring economy, we want fair and equal exchange. And that fair and equal exchange economy still is very powerful in our system. It's family, it's friends, it's community, and it's academia. Most of the work I do, like this interview, I'm not getting paid for this. I do it because I think it's the right thing to do. So this is very much what I would consider part of the reciprocity, fairness, and caring economy. I do this kind of thing because people do the same kind of favors for me.
Alan Ware 10:51
Right, and that gets at the social cooperation among us humans that you've talked about. And we have, in a way, coordinated a global system with a money economy and using the fossil fuels and non-renewable resources to supercharge the size of that and cooperate within unequal systems that have their own human inequalities and injustices. But as a total globe of 8 billion, the damage that we've done to nature has been enormous and a crucial element of ecological economics that you talk about too within this holistic evolutionary approach is understanding there are biophysical realities of the natural environment that should act as limits in the near term, the longer term, on the scale of human activity. And on this biophysical element, what do you see as mainstream economics approach to viewing the economy relationship to the natural environment?
Joshua Farley 11:44
I think it's pretty obvious. So Partha Dasgupta is a fairly famous, I would say, fairly conventional, economist who cares about the environment. But in one of his studies, he did a survey of a lot of leading economists he knows, and he says most of them say that nature contributes to, like, 1 to 2% to our well being. And so it's really hardly anything you should be concerned about, but they do recognize our economic activities often have unintended impacts on the environment that have negative consequences for others, and they refer to these as negative externalities. So, you know, I just drove to this conference, and the CO2 I spewed has negative impacts on others. They call it a negative externality. And what they say then we need to do is internalize that externality by putting a monetary value on it. And if we get the right monetary value, then the price mechanism will allocate everything with a monetary value in an optimal way that generates the greatest utility for all. And they call this internalizing externalities. So their idea is that we need to internalize nature into the economy. And implicit in this is that the economy is the whole and nature is the part, and there are no boundaries on the whole. It can expand indefinitely, is the way they see it. So we pursue exponential economic growth, and that means that we, basically most economists, would like to see the size of the global economy double every 20 years or so, and not realizing that the energy it takes to power an economy also doubles. The resource extraction doubles. So ecological economists totally acknowledge the economy is a subsystem of a finite planet. I mean, it's really the market is embedded in the economy is embedded in society is embedded in a finite planet. And this finite planet has two sources of power, energy, which is basically a perpetual flow of solar sun at a fixed rate over time, and a finite stock of fossil fuels that we can extract as quickly as we want. And all economic production requires energy. So 86% of our energy right now is fossil fuels, and we are extracting those astonishingly fast. Over all of the 250-300 thousand years of human history it's been this tiny little blip at the end within the past 150 years, 200 years, where we've been using fossil fuels extensively. So ecological economists know you need energy to do work, and you also need raw materials. You can't make nothing from something. It takes work to do energy. The only source of raw materials we have are the finite resources on our planet, and many of these alternatively serve as the structural building blocks of our ecosystems. So when we remove trees and we pave over land and we harvest all these animals, we are removing the structural building blocks of ecosystems, and those ecosystems generate functions essential for human survival. So every economic activity, every time we produce something using energy and raw materials, we are causing ecological costs. I'm not claiming that we can identify, precisely quantify, the costs or the benefits, but I think it's very, very clear that the ecological costs of economic growth now vastly exceed the economic benefits. So we've entered a period of uneconomic growth. Every time we increase the rate at which we use energy to extract raw materials and generate waste, which all flows back into the ecosystem and further degrades our ecosystems, every time we do that, we're becoming worse off, rather than better off. And especially so because of the economic growth, two-thirds go to the top 1%. And the top 1% has so much already, they get essentially no additional benefit from having more. So most of our economic growth produces zero benefits and yet has profound impacts on many of the poorest people in the world. Perversely, the people who are going to suffer worse from climate change are precisely those who have contributed the least to it and have the fewest resources to adapt to it.
Alan Ware 15:46
Right. And yet, economic thinking is still, like you said, supposing this 3% global GDP growth, which is correlated with energy and materials, and that that can go on for, I don't know how long they're thinking.
Joshua Farley 15:58
And not realizing that 3% economic growth now versus 1960, our economy has basically tripled in size, more than actually. I think it's per capita consumption about tripled probably since 1960 is, you know, three times more harmful to our ecosystems as 3% growth was when our economy was half as big.
Nandita Bajaj 16:15
Yeah, and we had spoken to another ecological economist recently, Clive Spash, who was talking about the example you gave of Partha Dasgupta, and like, surveying all the economists about, you know, nature's real value and how, by appealing to individual preferences, of like, you know what part of nature is valuable or relevant to you, you're effectively just ripping apart the integrity of the entire ecosystem, and you don't realize, in the long run what impact that is having in kind of unraveling the biophysical basis of the nature that we depend on. And yet you're kind of just looking at nature as these bits and pieces - productive, non-productive, helpful, non-helpful - and how one of the things he spoke about is species that don't seem that relevant or pretty or attractive to us, you know, don't have entertainment value, are just allowed to go extinct. And you and others have also noted that mainstream economics operates with this peculiar set of assumptions about human motivation, behavior and ethics, kind of what I was just talking about with the individual preferences. What are those assumptions, and how do they differ from the assumptions of ecological economists like yourself?
Joshua Farley 17:39
Yeah, so ignorance is just built in. I'll give one example is, you know, what was the value of a passenger pigeon? It used to be the most abundant bird species on the planet, but we didn't really know what it did. And it turns out there were, like 6 billion of them, and they ate massive amounts of acorns. And when we wiped those out, there was something about their ecology that below this huge population, they just crashed to extinction. We lost them. All those acorns they used to eat started to get eaten by mice and deer, which led to a boom in their populations, which led to a boom in tick populations, which led to a boom in the spirochete on tick populations that cause Lyme disease. So 100 years after wiping out passenger pigeons, we have an epidemic of Lyme disease. And that's impossible to know ahead of time. Ecosystems are far too complex to ever have You know, this idea that we could put a price on individual components. And I don't know who's made this comparison. It's not mine originally, but if you're on a life support function machine in a hospital and you've got to pay some bills, should you start selling parts of that machine that you don't know how it works? You know, that would be pretty idiotic and kind of when we're trying to put monetary values on nature, that's what we're trying to do. You know, this is a huge difference is that mainstream economists, you know, they have this caricature called Homo economicus, and most economists will now say, well, we'd recognize that's a caricature, but it's, you know, close enough for our purposes. And Homo economicus is perfectly rational, and rationality means always looking only after my own interests. We're considered these beings that have no concern for others. So we're perfectly rational, self-interested, and insatiable - that you know, more is always better. I think all three of these are patently absurd. And the idea that first of all, that we're individuals is, I always stress, you know, just take a look at these glasses. You know, what was required? How many people were required to build these glasses? Well, we needed people to mine the metal, transform the petroleum into plastics, and to do the lenses and to assemble it all, and those things. But then if you look at it in a bigger extent, well, how much knowledge was required to figure out how to make the metal? Well, we needed metallurgy. We needed to know about fossil fuels and chemistry. We needed to build the machinery to make these, the transportation systems. And if you look at it, the knowledge embedded in these glasses was created by billions of people over thousands of years. No single human has the capacity. If you train somebody every day intensively for their lifetimes, they could never know enough to make these glasses from scratch. We are absolutely dependent on each other more than almost any other species. So then the absurdity that we're individuals, that we're not a collective. You know, as I say, I think a human separate from our cultural knowledge and cultural artifacts can't survive for a week apart from society. So first of all, the idea that you can look at us as individuals is ridiculous. Assume we don't care for other humans is ridiculous. And rationality, in my mind, I look at evolutionary rationality. What's required to survive? And what's required to survive absolutely is working together as a social collective, which means always being concerned for others. If you're in a collective and you know there's somebody who doesn't care about any of you, only cares about themselves, back in ancient times you'd ostracize them and let them die. ((These days, we probably just throw them in jail or elect them to political office.)) And also the idea of we're insatiable. It's so obvious that, you know, once we have enough food, enough clothing, all the studies show that once we've reached a certain level, our wellbeing does not increase with more and more consumption. There is this idea, though, of status. So if we're going after status, that means having more of something than others. And so if we're looking at wealth as a form of status, then we always want more than others. But again, you're on this useless treadmill. If you double GDP for everybody, status stays the same. So pursuing higher and higher status through economic growth doesn't make anybody better off. On the flip side, it does mean, though, that we could have, you know, massive, massive taxes on wealth, also without affecting status and without affecting people's wellbeing. And you know, Elon Musk could be the richest person in the world with $25 million or with $2.5 million which would probably be more reasonable. You know, he could still obtain all his status. He would still have all his wildest consumption fantasies fulfilled, and we would lose nothing by ratcheting down our consumption. One of the problems though, what I mentioned with evolution, this multilevel selection theory, is the individual, you know a good person, places the group ahead of the individual, but often that evolved in antagonism towards other groups. So we put the group ahead of us, but often that's to take over resources or whatever, or destroy another group, which is problematic. But over human history, the size of the group has expanded from little bands of 150 to 200 to countries of 1.4 billion. So clearly, we have tremendous capacity to expand what is the group. And I actually think we need to expand our definition of group, not only to humanity, but to life. You know, we're all part of the same evolving system.
Nandita Bajaj 23:06
And do you think that kind of, what you call the cooperation as the superhuman power, that level, that magnitude of cooperation, is possible? We would love for that to be the case, but just given the poly crisis we find ourselves in, is that a plausible goal?
Joshua Farley 23:25
Kind of the way I look at it, it is absolutely necessary. What's implausible is continuing as we are, and we have abundant evidence. You know, if you'd asked anybody 100 years ago, 200 years ago, could we cooperate as a group of 1.4 billion, like the Chinese do, or even as a group of 360 million, like we do in the US, you would have said, No, that can't be done. But clearly we're doing it. I guess if I was going to say, What's the best path to achieve that, my view, and also to address this polycrisis, I don't believe in technological solutions. I actually ultimately believe the solution would be a fundamental extension of morality. We need to extend our moral sphere to other humans and to the rest of nature. But technology can play a very big role. And one of the things about knowledge is it improves through use. So when I think about the economics of knowledge, I want a system that generates the right knowledge at the lowest cost and maximizes its value once it exists. And because knowledge improves through use, sharing knowledge makes it improve faster. And if you remove the profit motive, a lot of information right now is produced through the profit motive. And to give you one example of how this works, there's this drug developed by Aventis called eflornithine. And it turns out it kills trypanosomes, which cause African sleeping sickness. But when Aventis was looking at, you know, if you're the free market pursuing knowledge, they want to make a profit. So Aventis says, well, what's the profit to be made from these 70 million people? Well, they have absolutely, extremely high demand, physiological demand. Market demand, I should say, is preferences weighted by purchasing power. Those poor Africans have very little purchasing power. Aventis was completely unwilling to produce that for those poor Africans. Turns out the same compound gets rid of unwanted facial hair in women, and that's your weighting preferences by purchasing power. So Aventis was delighted to do that, and that's what markets do. They're going to allocate our scientists to producing technologies that make money, when what we really need we want technologies that help the poor and technologies that address elements of the polycrisis like climate change and pandemics, these things where the benefits are collective and they're public goods, and markets are very uninterested in providing public goods. So the private sector is not going to allocate resources towards what we need. They're going to allocate it towards more profits. And so the point being, if I was going to put forward a policy that helps create a collective it would be a transnational knowledge commons. Ideally, any knowledge that contributes to solving the polycrisis is freely available to all on the condition that any improvements can't be patented. I am convinced that a scientist, working, for example, to cure diseases that affect the poor are going to be more excited about doing that than about hair removal formulas for women, and more excited to do research that protects the global environment and addresses the polycrisis than in the, you know, somehow make more money. This is one thing about cooperation. The more you cooperate with somebody, the more you know you can cooperate. So every activity where we engage in this type of cooperation strengthens our capacity to cooperate about bigger and more important issues, like you know about limiting CO2 emissions and limiting biodiversity loss. So I think the lowest hanging fruit, because it's negative cost, would be to do this transnational knowledge commons, and especially for technologies dedicated to a socially just sustainability transition.
Alan Ware 26:57
And if that doesn't happen through top down, then social or political movements to help create, yeah, as you mentioned, a kind of win, win on knowledge commons that are often roped off through property rights that are enforced by the state, so we need to have social movements to challenge that. And like you said, the trust will build over time. And we have many examples - sports teams, desegregated military, the Civilian Conservation Corps, all of these examples of you have to bring together diverse people to work on common goals, to build that trust. And I like how you mentioned this spiral of greater cooperation and greater trust can happen. We've certainly seen it on the way down, but we can build it on the way up.
Joshua Farley 27:42
Just to add very quickly, this transnational knowledge commons does not have to be a top down thing. My university, University of Vermont, we could just say that all the knowledge we generate is going to be freely available to all, and we invite others to participate in this coalition. And first of all, it would literally save us money right from the get go, because we wouldn't be trying for these intellectual property rights that cost a lot of money. And second of all, I bet a hell of a lot of funders would say, wow, we're gonna fund University of Vermont scientists first. So I think whatever university started this would be a massive boon to other researchers and give them a reputation. I think other universities would sign on pretty quick. So I don't think this needs to be a top down approach.
Nandita Bajaj 28:20
And this thing that you bring up about the more cooperation there is, the greater degree of social trust there is, which has been kind of the norm for such a huge part of human history, is the social trust in relationships because of reciprocity, and these relationships of you do something nice for someone, and then they owe it to you, just out of social relationships, something that has kind of been taken away through this very transactional relationship. And it doesn't even matter if the person with whom you're having a transactional relationship shares the same ethics and values with you.
Joshua Farley 28:57
No, I think you've got that exactly right. I actually think that throughout most of human history, our societies were based on reciprocity and gifting. There's this myth in mainstream economics that there were once barter societies, but anthropologists have really shown that myth to be nonsense. And, you know, reciprocity, it's a challenging thing to track. There's this idea called Dunbar's number, which is that the number of individuals in a group who can know each other well enough to know who I can trust, who I can't trust, is limited by the size of our brains. It scales with brain size among the primates and in humans is about 200 individuals. So this real basic idea of reciprocity and cooperation works quite well in small groups. We've figured out how to scale it up some by having you know, if you speak my language with my accent, if you have my religion with my religious symbols, if you have my nationality, then I will have much more of a tendency to trust you. So we've scaled up the capacity for trust through these evolved cultural mechanisms. We've figured out how to scale up trust. But when money came in, money, I think people interpret it is exactly measuring reciprocity. Reciprocity, it's an instinct. We reciprocate, just instinctually. Every transaction in one of these economies builds social ties, makes us stronger and more cohesive as a community, but it's very tough to keep track of. So money came along. And when you go to the store and you buy something, you don't write them a thank you note. You don't feel you owe them anything in the future. The transaction is just canceled out. So we have latched on to money as this source of reciprocity, or as a measure of reciprocity. And there is this concept in evolution of a super-normal stimulus, which is a lot of species evolve a simple algorithm for doing something. So birds, there's a bunch of birds, they have an algorithm where they will shove worms down the biggest red gaping maw they can find, and you can put the stupidest, artificial looking cardboard maw in a nest, and the mother bird will just shove the worms in there while her offspring starve. Or in Australia, there's this jewel beetle that mates with the largest brown, iridescent object it can find, the males do. And that worked great, because that was always the female until Australians started throwing beer bottles out the window, and now the males are all mating with these beer bottles, while the females go unimpregnated, and the species is at risk. And I look at money as our beer bottle. We're pursuing money as though it was building up the social ties and cooperation, when in reality, it's kind of annihilating them. And it used to be, before money, if you wanted to survive into your old age, you better be nice to people, so they'll take care of you if you can no longer work. With money, you can be the meanest asshole around, and as long as you have money, you're still going to be fine.
Alan Ware 31:45
Yeah, and you've talked about economics being the least interdisciplinary field and reciprocity, as you've kind of intimated, it can be complex and messy, and it's full of social cues and social obligations. You'd need to have social psychology and sociology and history and all of this messiness and complexity that mainstream economics, has a certain cleanness to it that they can get through creating everything in terms of money metrics. So this reciprocity is also much more complex. To have it be so much richer and more true socially reciprocating would be much more complex than economics can handle.
Joshua Farley 32:22
To scale up reciprocity to, you know, a society like ours, it's one of the challenges I'm looking at. So with one of my undergrad students, actually, we just wrote a paper. What would a food system look like where, you know, in these historical food systems where reciprocity and gifting was at play, either nobody went hungry or everybody went hungry. And so what I wanted to look like, what would it be like if we treated food as a commons? So the simplest way to do this is SNAP for all. SNAP in the US is food stamps. And right now, they're means tested. We give them to poorer people. But what we did, we estimated what it would take to feed everybody in the United States an ecologically and physiologically healthy diet. So, you know, it'd only be healthy foods with the lowest ecological impact, and we could do that with 1.2% of our GDP. So it's basically saying we could end hunger at a vanishingly small cost, but we're so obsessed with markets, we don't even look at that as an option. And within our city, we have another project I'm doing trying to restore the reciprocity gifting economy. This is an example. I've never mowed my lawn, so I just have wild grass, threw down a couple sheets of cardboard, put some compost on it, threw some squash seeds in there, almost no work. Grew 460 pounds of winter squash. And so I share that with all my neighbors. You have a surplus, you share. And now for breakfast this morning, I had sourdough bread that one of my neighbors brought me because, you know, they're delighted to get these fruits and vegetables. So right now we're doing this project on urban agroecology, where the idea is to convert all grass lawns to food production and native ecosystems to generate ecosystem services and ecological benefits. And so we're planting people's lawns, and for some it's on the condition that you share your surplus. And some of the lawns that we're turning into wildflowers, we sheet mulch this year, kill all the grass, but then through the sheet mulch plant, you know, squash and melons. And they're going to all be donated to a group my students organized here in Burlington, called Food Not Bombs, but it's been feeding the homeless for over four years every day, and the food will go to them. So the idea is everybody's going to produce an abundance of something. This year it's gonna be my plums and grapes and a few other things. I'll have a surplus. If everybody has some surplus, you share it, and more and more you get to that idea that food is something you share, and then people you know reciprocate by sharing in kind. And we want enough food that a lot of this goes to those who don't have it, so that, you know, food is something people walk by, they grab some plums or some cherries or some grapes off my front yard, you know, and just kind of move away from thinking of food as this market commodity.
Alan Ware 34:57
And there's so much lawns. I forget what size state of the US is planted in lawns. It's enormous.
Joshua Farley 35:05
Yeah, it's 40 million acres. It's twice the size of our national park system in the lower 48 and it's the largest irrigated crop in America. So Doug Tallamy is a really original thinker, and he's talking about, he calls it Homegrown National Park. And if we just convert all our lawns to native ecosystems, we've just tripled the size of our national park system
Alan Ware 35:22
And you were talking about things that don't involve money, that are a gift economy and reciprocity, and most of the world now in the global economy, it's dominated by money as the primary form of exchange. And you've mentioned that most people remain quite ignorant of how money works in the global economy. What do you wish everyone understood about money?
Joshua Farley 35:40
So when money emerged, it allowed us to coordinate economic activity, as you had mentioned, kind of Nandita, with people we neither know nor trust. And before we relied on trust. With money we no longer do. But money. I learned two three word phrases in my PhD about money. And one is that 'money facilitates barter'. The idea was that we had these barter systems, and then we developed money, and that made it easier. And the mainstream economic model, which is called the Walrasian general equilibrium model, works just fine in a barter economy or with money. You know, economists said, well, it works either way. You don't really need money, so money just facilitates barter, but it's not that important. And the other three word phrase I learned was, 'money is neutral'. We don't need to worry about where it comes from, how it's created, where it goes. I think that's absolutely crazy. I think who has the power to create money or destroy money has immense power in our society. And though article eight of the US Constitution, says only Congress has the power to coin money, we have absurdly interpreted that literally only Congress can make coins, but the right to create money has been turned over to the private banks. So even like Gregory Mankiw's textbook and leading textbooks say that banks are the intermediary between savers and borrowers, with the idea that if I put my money in the bank, somebody else can borrow my money. But that's total nonsense. Banks loan money into existence. When I went to take out a mortgage from the bank, the bank credited me $100,000 in my bank account. And that, to them, is a liability. To me, it's an asset. And to balance the liability at the bank, they had my IOU. They had my mortgage. To them, that's an asset, and to me, that's a liability. So my assets and liabilities balance. Their assets and liabilities balance. The books balance, so a lot of economists say, well, there's been no net creation of money or whatever, but the fact is, I have to pay that money back with interest. And in America right now, household debt is 80% of GDP and 10% of discretionary income goes to paying interest to these banks who we gave the right to create money out of thin air. So that gives them enormous power. The share of the financial sector in the US economy has more than quadrupled over recent decades. And I do think the financial sector and the insurance sector and the real estate sector are largely parasitic, and they are just siphoning off a little bit of these massive flows of money, getting extremely wealthy. So this is the big problem with money, is that when the economy is booming, banks will loan money hand over fist to businesses, and that provides more money for economic activities. Unfortunately, you have to pay all that money back with interest. So we've got to pay back more than we borrowed, which means we need continual inflows of money to pay back that old money. And if, for some reason, the economy suffers, and it stops being easy to pay back those banks, what those banks do is then they stop lending money, so make it harder and harder and harder to pay them back, because they're not loaning enough money to pay back the principal plus interest. And that drives massive financial crises and economic recessions. So we have a system that systematically produces recession and that's bank-created money. So I think it's really important we understand that. But the other element is government-created money. There's this weird idea that people have that the governments need to tax everybody so they can get the money to spend. But where did the money come from to begin with to tax? The governments spend money into existence, and the reason we take it and accept it is because we know we have to pay taxes. If we don't accept money, we can't pay taxes, we go to jail. So it's either accept money or go to jail. So the government can spend its money into existence and then tax it back if there's too much out there so that it's going to cause inflation, or if they want to tax pollution, or they want to tax wealth, they want to achieve other goals. Taxes are a super powerful way for achieving a variety of goals. So all these people are in a panic that the US government and other governments with their own sovereign currencies are in debt and going to go bankrupt. That's a nonsense idea. It comes from a gross misunderstanding of how money works. So one thing is, if we spend too much money when there's no resources, if everybody was employed and all the industries are producing at maximum capacity, and we tried to spend money, that's probably going to cause inflation, and all economic activity uses up natural resources. So we really do have very serious natural resource constraints, which limit how much the economy as a whole can essentially spend. But as long as we are cognizant of real resource limitations, we have the money to do things. So when, you know, 2008 came along and the banks did what they do and stopped lending money, driving our economy towards massive depression, the government ramped up expenditures, but that didn't even compensate for the amount by which the private sector was destroying money. So there was no inflation at all. And it's obviously different with COVID, where you had these supply chain blockages, and with fossil fuels and things like that, with our real biophysical limits, those things can drive inflation like mad. But it's not excessive spending by government per se that did that.
Alan Ware 41:00
So you would support money being more well, either the legislative body spends it into existence with public works projects, or, I'm not exactly sure how the North Dakota State Bank, but it has a similar kind of arrangement, right?
Joshua Farley 41:13
And what I would actually support is something along the lines of the North Dakota bank. I would like to see state banks. And if you think about it, you know, when a government spends money into existence, that creates money, taxes destroy money. Banks lend money into existence, repayment destroys money. So if you had state banks, they would lend money into existence. Repayment would destroy that money, and the interest that they would also have to repay would be essentially like a tax. And the reason I favor public banks over private banks is public banks, like the Bank of North Dakota, very often lend for the public good. They're not looking for what makes the most profit. They're looking for what creates the most social value. And what I see creating the most social value now is not more commodities, more consumption. It's preservation of our ecosystems. It's the knowledge required to generate alternative energy that should be freely given away. So you can't make money on the research and development of knowledge that's freely available to all. So I think we should have municipal, state, and national public banks. So we essentially are decentralizing monetary and fiscal policy to a large extent. And then interest payments to a public bank are just like paying more taxes, which makes me think of interest payments to a regular bank is allowing the private sector to tax me, which is illegal. But the idea of money, you know, it really is a social agreement about credit and debt. And we can design monetary systems to meet the needs of the average person or to meet the needs of the huge financiers and hedge funds. And we have chosen to do the latter.
Alan Ware 42:51
Yeah, in Burlington there, your agroecology project is probably not being funded by any bank, but if you had a Burlington Vermont Public Bank, you could have a much bigger agroecology project, right?
Joshua Farley 43:03
Yeah. The thing is, it would actually be lending money for the public good, but it doesn't generate a profit, because the whole point is making the food free. I can't borrow money to do something that provides free food.
Nandita Bajaj 43:14
And you've mentioned some of this earlier in the interview, but at the broadest level, as a summary of your ideas. What key ideas and principles do you believe should be guiding private actions and public policies if humanity hopes to achieve greater ecological balance and also social justice?
Joshua Farley 43:32
So I would say, you know, just straight ecological economics. The biggest idea is that we do live on a finite planet that captures a finite amount of energy which can be used to generate a finite flow of resources. And the most important thing is making sure our economy does not exceed those planetary boundaries. If we have planetary boundaries, then we have finite resources. We've got to pay very close attention to distribution. And so one thing is resources created by nature or by society as a whole, they belong to all of us equally. Instead, we use markets - preferences weighted by purchasing power. So we have this finite capacity for our atmosphere to absorb CO2. Who gets to use that is determined by how much money you have. So Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos can use 10,000 times as much as the rest of us, even though they didn't create that. There's no reason they should be entitled to that for more. So just distribution is really important, and we have to be very clear that markets are incapable of solving the problem of ecological sustainability or just distribution. They ignore most of the benefits from nature. They're just treated as free goods. What mainstream economists would want to do is put market prices on those. But one of the things is, how do we even do that? The irony, what they do is ask what people would be willing to pay. We're relying on individual choice to decide, like how much climate stability we want, or how clean of water we want, and its preferences weighted by purchasing powers. We only care what you have to say if you're rich. Those are absurd ideas for solving those problems. So I would say that we have to recognize that markets can't handle the sustainability issue. In terms of just distribution we have seen Piketty's work shows very clearly that capital grows faster than the economy as a whole. So it's a natural tendency of capitalism to concentrate wealth in the hands of the few, and that really undermines distribution. Mainstream economists claim that each factor of production is rewarded its marginal product. And what that means is that if I use another unit of labor, I will pay that person exactly how much value they produce for society. So economists say markets are just. And that's just total garbage. It's a nonsense idea, but what economists say is we need to have economic growth. And we need growth to end poverty. But what we saw during the COVID crisis is our economy was in like free fall. We saw the biggest decrease in childhood poverty in US history, and that's because we chose to do so. We developed policies that got rid of childhood poverty. When the COVID crisis ended, we got rid of those policies. As our economy was booming, we saw the biggest increase in childhood poverty in human history. There's no correlation beyond a certain point between economic growth and poverty. So I would say this idea that we need to grow the economy so we have resources to address our sustainability or poverty issues is just errant nonsense. You know, some people are totally opposed to markets. I actually think markets are quite good for satisfying questions of taste. The way a market works right now, a food market right now, is food is allocated to the person who can pay the most. Then, when you sell it to the person who pays the most, that contributes the most to GDP. So a loaf of bread is not going to go to the destitute mother with malnourished kids. It's going to go to the overfed American who can pay more, even if they're going to throw it in the garbage and use it for nothing. And we call that efficient. That's market efficiency. And so I really look at the market mechanism. It's allocating the essential resources, allocates them to those who need them least. So we have to be very aware of what markets can and can't do. But once we have an ecologically sustainable level of consumption and we've ensured a socially just distribution so everybody has enough, then I go to the market. I like apples better than oranges. Markets are a great place for those little choices. As long as we're all guaranteed enough food, then markets are a great way for letting people choose what foods they want. So I think markets are good for satisfying tastes and preferences, but not for ecological limits or just distribution.
Nandita Bajaj 47:48
To continue on with that thought, what might be some policies that could advance the goals of greater ecological and social justice?
Joshua Farley 47:57
A policy is always intended to achieve a goal, and I think our goal, with 8 billion people on a finite planet should be secure sufficiency. I'm a big fan of Herman Daly's idea that policies should first address ecologically sustainable scale and then address socially just distribution, and only then look at efficiency. But if the goal really is just secure sufficiency, I think we got to radically rethink our whole economic system, which right now is the idea, the ideology underlying our economic system is that we're insatiable. Consumption is good. More consumption is better. So the variable is consumption. Work is a chore we undertake to consume. I hope you two like me have a job you really love that gives you meaning and is fulfilling. I think that we have to remove consumption from the equation. We don't have enough for people to choose how much they're going to consume. We have enough for people to have a secure sufficiency, and then we reorient their economy to creating meaningful, enjoyable jobs that are very fulfilling and rewarding. And again, if you had workers in control of industries, they would balance how much we can sell our products for and have consumption with how enjoyable our work is. I think we have to refocus our economy to make the provisioning of needs for everybody a super enjoyable activity that we're all delighted to engage in. It's, oh yeah, it's Monday morning. So just a different approach to things. And then there's a million different other policies. I would completely take away the right for banks to create money. People talk about businesses they want to invest in new technologies and things to make the economy better, and that's where we get growth. Actually, the single investment a business can make with the highest returns is lobbying a politician. You know, they estimate like 22,000% of rate of return for lobbying politicians. So we clearly have to get money out of politics. There's so many different types of reforms that are needed. I talked about a knowledge commons. I talked about a food commons. I think common ownership of the wealth created by nature and society as a whole, and common ownership, including future generations, should be the dominant economic paradigm. This generation would have no right to reduce the availability of resources for future generations. And again, it's this idea of a resource kind of implies that, you know, all these things are just for us. We have to recognize that we have to prioritize the health of the ecosystem as a whole. And it's not saying at the cost of humanity, but prioritizing it over anything beyond secure sufficiency. The global ecosystem should take precedence over luxury consumption, for example. You know, there's so many different things we need to do, and which is why I often say changing our goals is first. So the idea we're insatiable and our goal is ever increasing GDP.
Nandita Bajaj 50:56
And your emphasis also on the two things that you talked about, prioritizing ecosystem integrity and sustainability and fair distribution ensures that, in a lot of socialist talk, sometimes the fair distribution trumps ecosystem integrity. So there's this idea that everyone just gets to share the plunder of the planet equally. So it's not often that you hear the two being talked about, because it's often, you know, you said as long as human need is met, but within that, there are limits to how many humans' needs can be met.
Joshua Farley 51:33
I just look at just distribution across generations. I think we have to care for the unborn. I think people are focused on sustainability first. To me, it makes no sense to care for the unborn and not those living in, you know, misery today, and for those who are just focused on, as you say, sharing the plunder, that's a pretty short term perspective as well.
Alan Ware 51:50
Right, yeah. It's a recognition of the, as you said, setting the scale of the planetary boundaries first not to exceed those. And once you've decided those, set the distribution according to sufficiency. I like that. Now you've discussed one of the biggest differences between degrowth movement, which shares a lot of these views we've been talking about, and ecological economics is a concern over population growth, and that degrowthers often dismiss it as a contributing factor. And we know you'll be attending a degrowth conference this summer, and are wondering how you're thinking about making the case for why they should include population growth.
Joshua Farley 52:29
I think part of this does stem from a lot of the early population growth people you know who were worried about the population bomb, etcetera. They did focus on rapid growth in poor countries, and it was borderline racist. And I think, like Garrett Hardin's lifeboat economics, you know, he said, if you're on a lifeboat, it's gonna sink if you allow too many people in. So therefore rich countries should keep people out, and population growth is their problem. You know, if you look at all the consumption that a human does of calories, so we have our metabolism, 2000 calories a day for our endosomatic organs, 2000 calories a day to sustain our body. But humans have what they call exosomatic organs, external things. I don't need a cheetah's legs to run fast. I can drive a car. I don't need wings to fly. I can fly on a plane. And I have a house instead of a turtle shell. If we look at all the energy required for my total metabolism, my social metabolism, I have the metabolism of a 30 ton primate. So there's two points I make about population. One is the anthropocentric nature of not caring about our population. Recent studies have shown that if you look at humans and their livestock, we account for 96% of terrestrial vertebrate biomass. That's enormous. And if you look at just humans alone, we have 10 times the biomass of all terrestrial vertebrates, or 10 times the biomass of all mammals. So if we're saying population is not a problem, to me, that's just a really extremely anthropocentric view that gives no rights or values to nature. I don't think we can do that. The other thing I think that's super, super important, I think, is that Walter Scheidel wrote a book called The Great Equalizer, in which he says one of the only times we've ever seen equality improve in history is when populations fall. So when the Black Death came and populations of Europe plunged, that was a massive redistribution of power from capitalist to labor. And I really think we need to start looking at population as an empowerment issue. And as you have these hugely increasing populations, it allows the capitalists to exploit the hell out of the workers. You know, if you're not going to work for me at this wage, then somebody else will. You know, the land is overwhelmingly concentrated in the hands of the rich. It's a finite supply. As demand goes up with population, the price goes up, and we're just transferring more and more resources to the very rich. But as soon as you see population starting to fall, and now there's, you know, less demand per unit of land prices start to fall. It means labor is in an increasingly powerful position with respect to capital and negotiating wages. It means they have increasing power with getting access to land. And I can't think of a single country in the world that wouldn't be better off with fewer people. And the idea, you know, there was an article in New York Times a couple years back, talking about, you know, the crisis, the demographic crisis, of falling population, that was going to destroy their economic model, because they would no longer be able to pay such low wages. So they were looking at that as a problem. And I, you know, when I hear people telling me that, oh, you know, you can't talk about population. I think is that because you want to keep buying cheap crap made in China. My deal is I think overpopulation in the rich countries does horrible harm to poor countries. I think overpopulation in poor countries does horrible harm to poor countries. I think overpopulation in a lot of countries does a huge advantage to the richest people on our planet because they're allowed to pay immiserating wages and the value of their capital assets increases. The more people there are, the more demand there is for their things. So I just think we've got to totally acknowledge the racism inherent in a lot of the old talk about overpopulation. I totally acknowledge that if you're just looking at social metabolism, the worst overpopulation is when somebody like Elon Musk has 10 kids. So it's the richest countries that have the worst overpopulation, but every country's gonna be better off with a lower population. And it really does empower the poor. And people say, Oh, but how do you sustain the elderly with a smaller population? Well, for one thing, if their housing costs are plunging, and I say, you know, this is very anecdotal and personal, my folks took care of me basically through college for 21 years. I took care of them for a week at the end of life. It is true that most medical expenses are at the end of life, but I don't get this idea that when we have too few people, then we have too many young people supporting the old. I'm not opposed to this idea of people working longer. If they're in careers like ours, where they're intellectual, they're fine. You know, I used to be a construction worker, I can see construction workers should be able to, you know, tough on the body, retire younger, or become in a more managerial position. But I think especially if we have an economy focused on developing meaningful, useful jobs, then work is a pleasure, and we can keep people employed for longer as our populations fall. So I don't really get a lot of these, this panic over falling population. I could see the big capitalists panicking, because it's gonna mean they're gonna start paying higher wages and the value of their assets is gonna go down. But for the rest of us, I don't see it so much of a cause of panic.
Alan Ware 57:53
Yeah, that's a lot of the media is owned by those people, run by those people, and they're very much in the pocket, or they have the outlook of mainstream economists. And it does seem like a lot of global asset holders now are older, and they've done very well through the doubling of the population since the 70s and the tripling of the material use and so forth. So it's good that Gen Z, smaller population, their labor will be dearer. The asset holders who have been enriched will have to pay higher wages, and that's a intergenerationally fair redistribution.
Joshua Farley 58:27
And as soon as population starts to go down, and there's less demand on land, the value of land will plunge because there's a fixed supply of land. So value is entirely determined by demand. And right now, most demand is actually speculative. You know, there's all this speculation, but as soon as the value starts to fall, the speculative demand disappears, which accelerates the reduction in prices and makes housing affordable again, and gives people access to land they need and.
Nandita Bajaj 58:50
And all the arguments that you've made, I mean every single one of them, you know you can check off the boxes for all of the things that people like us, our peers on the political left really care about - social justice, ecological justice. And yet, as I wrote in the article that I sent you a couple of days ago, this panic around population decline - the rich and the elite and the techno-fundamentalists and the ecomodernists and the religious fundamentalists, you know, and all of the capitalists who benefit from population growth are just allowed to totally run with it, because the left has done no analysis on the harms of population growth and the fact that population growth itself is premised on systematic reduction of gender equality, into pushing women into having lots of children in order to benefit these power structures.
Joshua Farley 59:48
And I did not mention that, but I look at it as women empowerment to a huge degree. But I remember when I was young, I was traveling through South America with a girlfriend, and we had very, very little money. I think we spent $3,000 over 18 months. So we'd hang out in poorer communities, and these women would say, where are your children? And my girlfriend would say, I take a pill so I don't have any. And they say, No, there's no such thing. So, yeah, I take one every day. Where do I get it?, was the next question. And so I think very often it is women would prefer to have fewer kids. Often it's pressure from the patriarchal society to have more kids. So I think it really disempowers women as well. And you know, it is true that when you educate women and empower them, they do have fewer kids. But it's also true I think you have more resources for education and empowerment, the fewer people there are. So you know what comes first, the empowerment or the fewer children. But I think they go hand in hand. I say this as the fourth son. My parents were doctors, so by my own logic, I shouldn't be here.
Nandita Bajaj 1:00:50
Well, we aren't responsible for a lot of the decisions our parents have made. But you know, as you've spoken about the value of cultural values, and helping to evolve cultural values through knowledge as commons, and being able to spread our values, not through genetic lineage, but through a spread of information.
Joshua Farley 1:01:13
Yeah, one more quick comment - I talked about evolution, and what I think I didn't say that's very, very important - the idea that the fittest individual has more offspring, and that's the selfish side, but culturally, the group evolves through culture, and culture is a collective, and anybody's fitness as an individual apart from culture is the same at zero. If you're removed from culture, you have zero fitness. So what I am preaching is the antithesis of social Darwinism. I am preaching that it's the most cooperative and collective group that outcompetes, has greater success. So it's cultural evolution rather than biological evolution. And cultural evolution can move extremely fast. But if there was one policy, I think that I would push. I think that social media has an ability to reach an unprecedented number of people on our planet and change their minds, and we've turned it over to the private sector, so it's entirely driven by profit. So what they want to do is maximize your exposure to ads so you buy as many products as possible, and the way you maximize time on social media is through polarization. What we need is an end to consumerism and cooperation, and we've decided to use the most powerful tool we have available to promote exactly the opposite. So I would actually put social media into that knowledge commons, where we develop algorithms that are designed to reduce teenage depression, to reduce anxiety, to reduce consumerism, to increase awareness of our ecological problems and social problems, and to decrease polarization, to promote the recognition that all those people in the red states, when you go talk to them, they're really nice people, good humans, decent people, just like us, and that, you know, it's the media that promotes this idea that those aren't good people. I mean, I used to do construction, and most of my colleagues were far to my political right, but they were damn good people, and that's my experience everywhere. People are generally good. And the idea that we'd ever allow some politician or political preference to get in the way of our community and friendships and stuff is insane. But social media, I think, promotes that division.
Nandita Bajaj 1:03:21
And on the back of that answer, given the degree of social division that there is in our community, and the ecological destruction on top of that, there is so much to be concerned about today. And given the reality of the enormous problems we're facing as part of the polycrisis, the meta crisis, the great unraveling, whatever you want to call it, what makes you most hopeful about humanity's ability to build a more cooperative, ecological, sustainable, socially just future?
Joshua Farley 1:03:56
In some ways, it is a very, very long history of doing that, figuring out how to cooperate at bigger and bigger scales. I mean, humans are a remarkably adaptive species. You know, they say we'll always do the right thing once we've exhausted every other possibility. So like I say, I do think we've developed tools that we could use to promote cultural evolution and desired ways, like social media being one of those tools. We've dedicated it to exactly the wrong goals, but we could repurpose it if we had it dedicated to the correct goals. So I find that encouraging. I'm not a technological optimist. I'm not an ecomodernist, but the fact is, I do view human knowledge as collective, and we are now 8 billion people interconnected as never before, with the capacity to store information, so our collective knowledge is increasing very quickly. And again, I think that markets produce the wrong kind of knowledge focused on profits when we really need to be focused on meeting the needs of the poor and providing public goods, basically. So again, I would like to take the knowledge sector out of the market economy and not have it dedicated toward profit. So if we can make those steps, I'd be very happy. My mentor, Herman Daly, I love to see the fact that, you know, his ideas are really catching on. Saturday in the New York Times, big front page release, electronic edition, is about degrowth, and, you know, talking about, we need less. So I think that I do see a lot of hopeful signs. What I'm calling for actually, it's not technological solutions or policy solutions. As I said before, it's like a fundamental extension of morality, recognizing that other people have moral standing, and other species have moral standing. And I see what the young generation has done in changing our moral values in a really short time, and that I find tremendously encouraging. You know? What I found is that I used to be a little embarrassed as my grad students referred to themselves as the Farley boys, because they were all men, but now I have a super diverse group of grad students from, interestingly, every continent except Europe and Australia, and they all are united by these shared values. So they're all really good friends. And I see them really getting ecological economics, taking these ideas out there, and really dedicated to changing the world. And it's not just this thing of you know, rich white people pursuing these goals. It has become an increasingly collective enterprise. So my grad students make me really hopeful. It is the capacity for rapid change once we get the right goals. Right now I think we have exactly the wrong goals. The ever increasing material consumption is just about the most perverse goal I could imagine. And even on an individual level, the things I do that are most sustainable are also the most rewarding and fulfilling. So when we're done here, I'm going to take a gorgeous bike ride home along the lake, which is my morning commute, and then I'll go work in my garden, which just relaxes me, makes me feel great. So it is the things that are the lowest impacts that are often the most rewarding. They say that the worst point in a typical person's day is commuting to work alone, whereas like getting exercise typically buoys your mood, makes you healthier, all that. and so, swapping out cars for bikes, that's not a sacrifice. Actually, I think a lot of the changes we need to make, we say, oh, there's gonna be terrible sacrifices. No, we're really moving towards a much, much better world with secure sufficiency, never having to worry about meeting your basic needs. It's kind of utopian, but it actually takes very few resources. And again, if I was going to look at policies that we're talking about right now, how do we convert our energy system? That's not the idea. We need to reduce our energy system. I could see going to totally alternative energy if we're reducing our energy consumption in the US by 80%. But first and foremost is that reducing our energy consumption by 80%, because we're consuming so much. It doesn't make us any happier. I think we're actually sacrificing our wellbeing on the altar of growth, and that sustainability is not a sacrifice. You know, a more just and sustainable future is an amazingly rich and rewarding place to be, ((and this increasingly anxious and stressed out and polluted world through growth is a horrible vision of the future.))
Nandita Bajaj 1:08:12
Well, this seems like a really wonderful place to end the conversation. Thanks so much Josh for joining us and sharing such valuable insights. Your expertise in both ecological economics but also your ability to think in terms of these broad, interconnected systems that include social justice have really illuminated the critical changes that are necessary for a healthier planet and a much fairer society. So we're so appreciative that you could give us some of your time today.
Alan Ware 1:08:44
Yeah, and you're such a great communicator of all this. We really appreciate that.
Joshua Farley 1:08:48
Thank you, and nice to meet you both, and I'm really thrilled with what you're doing. I know you interviewed Bill Rees and Clive Spash and these ideas gotta get out there. So thank you so much for what you do.
Alan Ware 1:08:57
That's all for this edition of the Overpopulation Podcast. Visit populationbalance.org to learn more. To share feedback or guest recommendations, write to us using the contact form on our site or by emailing us at podcast at populationbalance.org. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate us on your favorite podcast platform and share it widely. We couldn't do this work without the support of listeners like you, and we hope you'll consider a one-time or recurring donation.
Nandita Bajaj 1:09:27
Until next time, I'm Nandita Bajaj, thanking you for your interest in our work and for your efforts in helping us all shrink toward abundance.
