Rethinking Lifestyle

Addressing the economic and ecological problems of the 21st century

The human family is about to get a little bigger. According to the United Nations, the global population will reach seven billion this Halloween – on October 31, 2011. It would be too easy to say that the coincidental alignment of this milestone with Halloween should be cause for fear. We don’t need to be afraid of a few more babies; birthrates are even decreasing in some parts of the world. What we should be deeply concerned about is the likelihood that these babies will one day aspire to Western lifestyles at a time when the planet simply can’t handle any more materially opulent aspirations.

Our way of life in the West not only puts immense pressure on the environment, it has also become a catalyst for economic volatility on a scale we’ve never seen before. We have designed our economic system to – as economist Tim Jackson describes – “spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need to create impressions that won’t last on people we don’t care about.” Unlike what most mainstream economists will tell you, that’s a recipe for disaster, not prosperity.

Take a moment to consider how the global economy is performing. Oil prices reached $113 a barrel earlier this year, contrasted with a low of $13 a barrel in 1999 (today they hover around $86). Stocks have seen unprecedented volatility; so too have the prices of grains and other essential foodstuffs. Major economies still haven’t fixed a broken financial system that inflates the prices of assets (such as mortgages) and permits a wasteful kind of “gambling” with legitimately earned money. If investment banking was working properly it would be facilitating much-needed investment in green infrastructure, not phony new financial products that consume rather than produce capital.

If this is what a “growing economy” looks like in the 21st century, we should clearly be aiming for something better! It’s time to start being rational rather than dogmatic about the word “growth.” We need to shake ourselves out of collective denial and engineer an economy that is more practical, meaningful and truly prosperous. Recent global protests such as Occupy Wall Street represent an awakening economic consciousness and a backlash against the status quo. They are revealing the cracks of a deeply broken system. But they’re not yet specific and productive.

I invite you to join me in applying specific solutions to these problems by engineering a new economy with a firm foundation. Fostering economic degrowth towards a steady-state doesn’t mean recession; it means fostering a balanced, manageable level of resource flows. It doesn’t mean going back to the dark ages; it means a life more happily and meaningfully lived.

Using the power of entrepreneurship and innovation, we need to find common purpose in the realignment of our overarching social and economic goals – not toward yesterday’s notions of solidarity or neoliberalism – but towards pragmatic and meaningful capital maintenance for prosperity without growth.