Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities

by Vaclav Smil

On the global level, there is no greater what-comes-after-growth uncertainty than the very fate of modern high-energy civilization with its still continuing population growth, high material requirements, and commensurately high environmental impacts.

Wrong decisions can accelerate decline and demise, while proceeding cautiously could greatly limit most (if not all) undesirable biospheric and social outcomes. Acting in radical ways could open new prospects for global civilization. What comes after the growth our civilization has experienced during the past two centuries will determine if we will prosper as a species not only during the next two centuries but perhaps for millennia to come.

Many of these necessities of life are durable products with many of their market segments being quite limited (how many hammers will an average family buy in half a century?);

But in some cases commercial demise does not mean the absolute end of old techniques, processes, or machines: techniques linger, forming very long but barely noticeable asymmetrical

right tails of normal distribution.

Declining fertility rather than changing mortality is the dominant factor in contemporary population

aging (Lee and Zhou 2017) and in a concurrent rise of old age dependency ratios.

A cascade of socioeconomic consequences resulting from these new demographic realities is self-evident—but no society is prepared to deal with it, particularly not one that still continues to reject any substantial immigration.

more than 1.5 billion of these complex artifacts (built of aluminum, plastics, glass, and precious metals) are now discarded every year.

Obviously, such trends cannot continue on a planet that is expected to accommodate some 10 billion people before the end of this century,

“that growth in GDP ultimately cannot plausibly be decoupled from growth in material and energy use, demonstrating categorically that GDP growth cannot be sustained indefinitely.”

Circularization of the two key flows is impossible (reusing spent energy would require nothing less than abolishing entropy; reusing water used in cropping would require the capture of all evapotranspiration and field runoff), and (with the exception of a few metals in some countries) high-intensity (>80% of total flows), mass-scale recycling of materials (above all construction waste, plastics, and electronic waste) remains elusive.

Daly (2009) summed up the three conditions that would allow continuous economic growth on the Earth: if the economy were not an open subsystem of a finite and nongrowing biophysical system; if the economy were growing in a nonphysical dimension; and if the laws of thermodynamics did not apply. But none of these realities can be evaded, circumvented, or substituted by other arrangements—

the cowboy being symbolic of the illimitable plains and also associated with

reckless, exploitative, romantic, and violent behavior, which is characteristic of open societies. The closed economy of the future might similarly be called the “spaceman” economy, in which the earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything, either for extraction or for pollution, and in which, therefore, man must find his place in a cyclical ecological system which is capable of continuous reproduction of material form even though it cannot escape having inputs of energy. The difference between the two types of economy becomes most apparent in the attitude towards consumption. In the cowboy economy, consumption is regarded as a good thing and production likewise … By contrast, in the spaceman economy, throughput is by no means a desideratum, and is indeed to be regarded as something to be minimized rather than maximized … This idea that both production and consumption are bad things rather than good things is very strange to economists … (Boulding 1966, 7–8)

reflecting concerns about the Earth’s carrying capacity, led to the rise of a new discipline of ecological economics (Daly 1980; Costanza 1997; Daly and Farley 2010; Martínez-Alier 2015). This has eventually led to advocacy of not just economies without any growth but ones deliberately trying to reduce overall economic output, a shift awkwardly labeled as de-growth. Book titles convey these sentiments: Living within Limits (Hardin 1992); Beyond Growth (Daly 1996); Prosperity without Growth (Jackson 2009); From Bioeconomics to Degrowth (Georgescu-Roegen and Bonaiuti 2011); The Economics of Enough (Coyle 2011); Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era (D’Alisa et al. 2014). In reality, there are no economies embarking on such paths.

In relative terms (per unit of economic product) the global economy has shifted in the direction of greater sustainability but in absolute terms it has shown no tendency toward deliberately slower growth, and degrowth remains a cherished topic for ecological economists, not a guiding principle for any companies or governments. As a result, we can only speculate when and how we might be able to put an

end to material growth and forge a new society that would survive without worshipping the impossible god of continuously increasing consumption: no country has committed to following such a path.

I agree that “on today’s evidence, technologizing our way out of this does not look likely … the only solution left to us is to change our behavior, radically and globally, on every level. In short, we urgently need to consume less. A lot less.”

But scientific understanding offers no clear grasp of what lies ahead. Utopianism (now in its techno-optimistic-electronic-artificial-intelligence garb) and catastrophism (updated Malthusianism concerned with exhaustion of natural resources and destruction of the biosphere’s

capacity to support continued economic growth) are not just labels for contradictory opinions and sentiments of uninformed commentators. The terms correctly describe divergent views that coexist within the mainstream of modern scientific research.

must begin to decline during this century (Hoornweg et al. 2013) and that we should contemplate the peak of everything due to the imminent depletion of many mineral resources (Heinberg 2010; Klare 2012)? Should we then view the future of mass consumption with equanimity or with increasing foreboding? Or, to rephrase it by reusing the labels chosen for the title of a recent book examining the two polar positions, should we listen to prophets of environmental perils or ignore them because the salvation will come from inventive wizards (Mann 2018)?

The mass of newly sold cars was thus 180 times that of all portable electronics—but their production required only seven times as much energy.

Hopes for an early end to this demand are unrealistic because the growth of material consumption is a universal and durable phenomenon: objects of desire change, desire remains.

In contrast, it is not difficult to offer a very different scenario that, while not highly likely, is not implausible. African fertilities decline much faster than expected. Indian population growth decelerates rapidly. Rest of the world sees population stagnations and declines. Aging populations consume less and this, in combination with relative dematerialization, eases the burdens imposed on the biosphere. Economic growth moderates while advances in energy conversion and storage usher in affordable all-electric or hydrogen economies. Natural ecosystems begin their comeback, as forests have already done in Europe and parts of North America. I wish all of this came to pass as rapidly as possible—but acting as responsible risk

There is no need to be a catastrophist in order to see what I call the great obverse: all that we have lost as a result of growth in general and mass consumption of artifacts and experiences in particular, the extent to which we have already imperiled the life on Earth, and the potential for further damage resulting from a growing population and rising aspirations. The overall environmental cost of growth is still going up as it spans an enormous range of impacts.

There is no need to resort to exaggerated claims about species loss to realize that the decline of global biodiversity has been proceeding at rates that, on geological time scales, may already amount to the Earth’s sixth mass extinction wave (Barnosky et al. 2011). I have calculated that during the 20th century the mass of wild mammals was halved (and the mass of elephants was reduced by 90%), while the mass of domesticated animals more than tripled and the global mass of humanity more than quadrupled (Smil 2013a). People and their animals have been steadily marginalizing all wild

species.

How many people are taking seriously an even more unthinkable goal, one that aims not only at setting limits but having deliberately declining levels and performances (or, in inelegant and inaccurate newspeak, “negative growth” or “degrowth”) as its widely accepted and broadly pursued way of regress.

That is as true of the depletion of deep aquifers (whose water is withdrawn for mostly highly inefficient crop irrigation) and deforestation in wet tropics (the harbors of the biosphere’s greatest species diversity) as it is of the globally excessive soil erosion that is, slowly but steadily, diminishing the productive capacity of crop fields; as true of the continuing losses of biodiversity (be it due to deforestation, spreading urbanization, or demand for traditional medicines) as it is of a multifaceted assault on the oceans that ranges from overfishing at the top of the marine food chain to the now ubiquitous presence of microplastics in seawater (GESAMP 2015).

But we are on a much firmer ground when concluding that the past practices—pursuit of the highest possible economic growth rates, extending the culture of excessive consumption to additional billions of people, and treating the biosphere as a mere assembly of goods and services to be exploited (and used as a dumping ground) with impunity—must change in radical ways.