Grow Your Own Way

Growth is the mantra. Growth we are told is the key to everything. When economies stop growing through consecutive quarters we get recession and all the attendant shrinkage and hardship. Growth they say will make everything good again.

There are now seven billion people on the planet, unchecked growth can no longer be sustained. Growth implies spiraling demand for everything. For food, for consumer goods, for machinery, for housing, for infrastructure and the impact of all of that on the finite resources of the planet is not pretty. You can fill all the green bins in the world with cornflake boxes but deep down we all know, whether we acknowledge it or not, that this cannot possibly end well. With all the emerging territories the growth we can expect henceforth isn’t like the gentle, polite arc we have become used to in the western world. When the Chinese really get going they’re going to rage, consuming everything in their path. And they are not the only ones just getting started.

Then there’s the micro level, the human cost of insurmountable debt and misery that seems to be the only tangible legacy of the last growth spurt. What did this country really come away from the party with; a few new stretches of tarmac, a tram in Dublin, countless monuments to bad architecture and a million tales of overwhelming debt and desperation.

Essentially we are mired in a mindset whereby a person’s worth or usefulness is measured by how much shit they consume. A mindset which has been successfully created by latter day Don Drapers cheerled by politicians and big business. How often have you heard it said “we need to get people back into the shops and spending, that’s the only route to recovery” For who? As long as we collectively have a perception of each other as being inadequate if we don’t spend money we don’t have on crap we don’t need then this cycle never changes.

So how do we reconcile these two apparently opposing realities? We need growth to live comfortably but the same growth will kill us all quicker. It’s all a bit rock n’ roll really.

Growth is the only way forward. Spot on. Winter cabbage; below ground baby, below ground.