Three Mountains We Must Climb: Conservation, Population and Economic Reform
To build a better future, we need new economic systems that reward human innovation without requiring human expansion.
An editorial from MOTHER EARTH NEWS
December 2008/January 2009
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Conservation. Population. Economic reform. It’s time for us to visualize the future we desire. To get there, we’ll have to tackle these three significant issues together.
BRYAN WELCH
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It’s time for us to start visualizing the future we desire. What would a sustainable world look like, and how do we get there? One way to think about it is to consider that we have three tall mountains to climb.
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Conservation is the first — if smallest — mountain. We need to forestall the effects of global warming as much as possible. Right now, we’re on the lower slopes of this first mountain.
The next climb will be longer and steeper — population control is perfectly unavoidable. We must choose to stabilize human population, or we’ll make more of a mess of our habitat and then nature will exert the control we abdicated.
To slow our rapid population growth won’t require Draconian measures. Consider what would happen if the international moral consensus were that each human being should reproduce himself or herself once — two children per couple? That’s all it would take for populations to begin slowly shrinking. It’s a simplistic solution, but the ultimate solutions are often the simplest. We’ll have to negotiate some difficult routes through political conflicts to reach the top of this mountain.
That leaves the third and tallest mountain, economic reform. As our economies are now structured, we depend on population growth to support economic growth. Imagine a world in which demand for all the fundamental human necessities — food, shelter, etc. — were shrinking every year. To sustain our population at lower, healthier levels, we’ll have to invent a human economy that can maintain prosperity without growth. To do that, we’ll need brand new economic tools.
We need new systems in which no one is placed at an unfair disadvantage. That doesn’t mean turning to socialism, communism or any other obsolete social system. Instead, we need something new that rewards human innovation without requiring human expansion. Simply put, our new economic systems will require unprecedented cooperation across class, cultural and political barriers.
