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Gaya Herrington explains the limits to economic growth and environmental impact
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00:00Good morning. I'm so glad to be here.
00:04I'm a sustainability researcher with a background in econometrics.
00:10So if I remember anything from my students, it's that growth is always good, right?
00:19But is that really true?
00:23Is it growth always, does it always lead to social progress?
00:28That is what we've been told.
00:30We measure a company's success by its profit growth.
00:36And we measure a country's success by its GDP growth.
00:41But especially in these high GDP countries, the rich countries, happiness levels have not at all kept up with GDP
00:51growth.
00:53And today, the question becomes undeniable.
00:58Why, if growth is always good, at least in these rich countries, have we not eradicated poverty?
01:07We're not even happier there.
01:11Why, despite all our progress and innovation, do we keep seeing these same persistent problems?
01:21In fact, the person who came up with the GDP as a metric, Simon Kuznets, a little under 100 years
01:29ago,
01:29he already warned at the time, he said, don't use this to measure well-being.
01:37And so we have to wonder, it's not just poverty, right?
01:42It's why, despite all our innovation and our progress, do we still have poverty around the world?
01:50But also pollution, scarcity, conflict.
01:57About half a century ago, a group of thinkers called the Club of Rome asked this same question.
02:06Presumably, they said, these things are interrelated, but how?
02:11And they asked a group of MIT scientists here in the middle to find the answer.
02:19And to do so, they created a first-of-its-kind world model with, at the time, new modeling technique
02:27called system dynamics.
02:29So they took global variables like population, food production, fertility levels, well-being levels, natural resources.
02:37As a whole, it was a very complex model.
02:41And with that, they ran scenarios all the way to the 21st century.
02:46The first model was called the business-as-usual, and that ran on historical averages only.
02:56So it didn't have any additional assumptions.
03:00And that one showed a collapse setting in around now.
03:07So at the time, decades into the future.
03:10But for us here, present day, not all scenarios ended in collapse.
03:17There were some others where there were additional assumptions.
03:20Notably, there was the stabilized world scenario.
03:25And there, it was assumed that humanity as a whole at some point says, oh, that's enough stuff.
03:31And then all the resources that are freed up from that were deliberately redirected to natural protection and human services
03:42like education and health care.
03:45And in that scenario, you see still industrial output and well-being levels increase.
03:54That's what a collapse is, by the way.
03:57It's not the end of humanity, but it's a steep decline from a previous peak.
04:03And so they wrote a book on their findings called The Limits to Growth, which was published in 1972.
04:10And it was a bestseller at the time.
04:13And after that, it was very effectively buried.
04:16And so not many people wondered what had come of it.
04:21And so just a few years back, I was like, okay, well, we have a couple decades of empirical data.
04:30So we can just check it now.
04:33And so that's what I did.
04:35This is the well-being variable.
04:37So there were many more, but arguably, this is the one we're most interested in.
04:41And so the dotted white line is the empirical data.
04:47So I did this for many variables.
04:49And then I published it in Yale's Journal of Industrial Ecology.
04:54And then later I wrote a book about it in 2022, which you can purchase, but it's also free to
05:01download for everyone who wants to see it.
05:03And this is what I found, an overall close alignment with the scenarios, because they haven't diverged much yet.
05:13But as you can see, they are starting to diverge.
05:17And it was possible to distinguish between them.
05:22I found humanity most closely tracking the business-as-usual scenario.
05:29That's the orange line.
05:33We were least closely aligned with the yellow line, which is that stabilized world scenario showing the least declines.
05:42It was a very close track, and I have worked for years in finance and as an economic policymaker at
05:49the Dutch Central Bank.
05:50So I've seen a lot of models in my time.
05:55I don't know of any other model that was this accurate decades into the future.
06:01So that means it's a useful model.
06:04All models are wrong, but some of them are useful.
06:07And if this one is useful, we should heed its message.
06:12What is the message?
06:13Well, not all scenarios ended in collapse, but none of them showed growth continuing indefinitely.
06:22So that means growth is not a good goal.
06:26And the question we're facing is not whether we keep growing or not.
06:33It's whether the end of growth comes by design or disaster.
06:39Either we choose our own limits, like in that stabilized world scenario, or we will have them forced upon us,
06:48like in the business-as-usual scenario.
06:58Now, I believe we are too late for the design scenario.
07:05There's a lot of uncertainty around collapse, so nobody knows for sure.
07:13But you don't really need my research for that.
07:17It was just mentioned, it was mentioned by Johan Rockström last year on this stage, when he explained,
07:25we have now to unscressed seven of the nine planetary boundaries, up from six boundaries two years ago, up from
07:33four boundaries in 2015.
07:36So we're not even heading in the right direction.
07:41We have, we're only accelerating when it comes to biodiversity loss or decertification or water scarcity.
07:50And this is not because we're not innovative, because of course we are.
07:57But this was also already described by the limits to growth authors.
08:03In a closed system, like our Earth, it's abundant but finite.
08:11What you do to innovate yourself out of one constraint typically gives rise to a new constraint somewhere else in
08:20the system.
08:22And over time, these new constraints come faster and faster.
08:28And so that's what this Foley crisis is.
08:32These new constraints coming faster and faster.
08:35That's what the limits to growth authors already wrote in their book.
08:40They say, of course we're very innovative.
08:42But before we completely run out of resources or clean air, we will run out of our ability to cope.
08:53That's what this Foley crisis is.
08:56It's humanity running out of its ability to cope.
09:05Thank you for not booing me off the stage, by the way.
09:09I know this is a lot.
09:12It's a lot.
09:14It takes years.
09:15Me too.
09:16It's a grieving process.
09:18Because we've all been told this notion of linear progress.
09:23And it takes emotional work to let go of this image that you had of the future, but you will
09:30have more.
09:31And then your children will have even more.
09:36And so wherever you are in this process is okay.
09:41So just by a show of hands, there's this spectrum that people have come up with working in this space.
09:50Who here is at one where they're like, okay, that's a bit traumatic.
09:59Okay.
10:00We're just, we're going to be fine.
10:02It's able to work itself out.
10:05No, I didn't think that in this audience.
10:07But who is of the mindset of, well, yes, so we have this issue.
10:13We can fix that within the system.
10:16We're going to internalize environmental costs and stuff.
10:20And then it will be fine.
10:21Who feels that?
10:23All right.
10:26Who understands all these things are interconnected?
10:30So the environmental with the inequalities, the geopolitical conflicts that we see arising, the disruption from technology, AI, and others.
10:41Who understands we're in a poli crisis, but also thinks we can still fix the poli crisis.
10:49We can, we just have to understand the complexity better.
10:52And we focus on the leverage points and that's, we can do the system change still by design.
10:59Who, who thinks that?
11:01Yeah.
11:02Me too.
11:04Just a few years ago.
11:08Who is in feeling quite sad right now?
11:12Because they're in four and they're, they understand the poli crisis and they've come to realize there's only one way
11:21this will end.
11:23Who's there?
11:24Yeah.
11:25I feel you.
11:28There is a fifth one.
11:30So I would like to take you in that where it's a bit of a, you, we're going to go
11:37down.
11:37And then we're going to come back up and realize that this is not just a capitulation to grim necessity.
11:47And there's still a lot we can do.
11:49That's where I work in collapse resilience.
11:53Because we still decide how this collapse will unfold from where we will fall, how the, the burden is carried.
12:02If it's, we can make it as congenial and just as possible.
12:07And of course we can talk about how we repattern afterwards, how we decide, okay, well, we're going to keep
12:14that, that we should not do again.
12:17That, that was, that was, that was dumb.
12:20So I want to talk more about that.
12:25We have the solutions.
12:28I think that's important.
12:29We know we have the imperative, we have the urgency, even people who are still working in collapse avoidance.
12:36I think we can all agree we're running out of time.
12:39So we have the urgency, we have the imperative.
12:41We also have the solutions technologically.
12:46I think we, we know that we definitely have the renewable energy generation.
12:51Brazil is pretty advanced actually there, but the other like regenerative agriculture or radical circularity.
12:59with actually something that AI is truly useful for, but also the internet of things.
13:06This, we, we understand that we can do that.
13:09We won't do it to the sufficient extent in a growthist economy, but we also have the frameworks for how
13:17that economy could work better.
13:19They go under many names, donut economics, I use well-being economics, an indigenous economy, post-growth economy.
13:31They all, they have different emphasis, but they're all do the same things, which is, if growth cannot be the
13:39ultimate goal of the economy, what should replace it?
13:43And it's some notion of, I would, I would say, human and ecological well-being.
13:50An economy where growth is in service of life instead of the other way around.
13:57Now, this is actually becoming mainstream.
14:02It is not the standard, obviously, but it's also no longer fringe.
14:07It has been covered just over the past few years in mainstream magazines like Nature or The Lancet.
14:14Also business, more Harvard Business Review, Time Magazine, Financial Times.
14:19And so, this is growing in popularity.
14:24I am starting this fall at Harvard, of course, in post-growth economics.
14:32In fact, I have to excuse myself later today because I'm giving the first lecture remote later so that I
14:41could be here with you today.
14:43Now, we also know how to get there.
14:47Right now, we're kind of in a growth addiction because our lives have been designed by policy to be dependent
14:54on growth.
14:55So, how do you get free from that?
14:57How do you guarantee livelihoods while bringing the environmental footprint down?
15:03Now, we also have policies for that that's called degrowth.
15:06So, it's not anti-growth, but it just recognizes, okay, well, we're in this, we're in this roller coaster.
15:14We can't keep going up.
15:16And so, it's a managed way of saying, okay, we're going to stabilize.
15:21We're going to deliberately now bring down our environmental footprint.
15:26And then we're going to be in a steady state and dynamic equilibrium.
15:31That's why we have the Ferris wheel.
15:33Because just not growing doesn't mean there's no more innovation and there's no more fun.
15:38And it's still fun.
15:40It's just a lot of, we have fun together without growing our footprint.
15:48So, all these things are already there.
15:52And that brings me to the opportunity.
15:56Because, yes, we have the imperative and the urgency and the solutions, but implementing those is not a capitulation to
16:05grim necessity.
16:08Where this economy does a so-so job in eradicating poverty, but it does a properly wretched job in fulfilling
16:17our emotional and spiritual needs.
16:19In an economy where you can never have enough, it's easy to feel like you never are enough.
16:27In moderation, material products can be a conduit for connection.
16:35But if you have too much of them, the world just deadens into stuff and we can't find belonging anymore.
16:42And we need that.
16:45See, when we talk about systems change, it can be quite overwhelming.
16:52And yet, there's a very clear place to start.
16:58You.
16:59It's at the deeply personal level where we first have to change this narrative about who we are.
17:08And what world we may dare to hope for.
17:11We've all been told the story of separation, right?
17:16We are selfish maximizers.
17:19We can never have enough.
17:21And we discount impacts on others and nature as externalities.
17:30But science shows that this doesn't describe us very well, actually.
17:35We can be selfish when our basic needs are not securely met.
17:40But once they are, we are much more playful and curious and altruistic than this homo economicus that most of
17:51us have heard of could ever be.
17:55Once our basic needs are met, we need different things, emotional, spiritual things, like a sense of community, a sense
18:05of purpose.
18:06And you cannot get that without connecting to others.
18:10So we cannot really be happy unless things around us are happy, too.
18:18As indigenous scholar Robin Wall Kimmerer puts it, all thriving is mutual.
18:26And this is the story of interdependence, in which we are nature.
18:33This is not AI, by the way.
18:36These are real pictures.
18:38And so once our basic needs are met, there's nothing more that we want than to feel like we contribute
18:47to this web of life that we feel we're all part of.
18:53When the news of the Amazon rainforest being on fire reaches us in the U.S. or in Europe, it
19:01hurts us.
19:03My friends tell me that.
19:05It's not just sadness for all the precious biodiversity that is lost.
19:11It hurts because we feel part of us is dying, too.
19:21And so if this is a story that describes us better, then we have to build technology, our infrastructure, policies,
19:32economic frameworks on that story.
19:35And so you change, you heal from this story of separation.
19:38You've been told what an ugly sociopath you are, basically, and you heal from that.
19:44And from that, you go out and work in the system wherever you are.
19:49You always have influence.
19:53And one of the ways that I'm doing that is in bioregionalism.
20:00So we have that in the U.S., a country of opposites, just like Brazil.
20:06I know you all know what's going on.
20:09We have a lot of pressure to open up lands for more mining, same as in Brazil.
20:15But we also have this growing movement of bioregionalism.
20:19And what that is, is that we organize as nature.
20:22So first of all, we organize not by human-imposed borders, which are arbitrary and colonial.
20:31We go with the real things, the things you can actually see from space.
20:36So these are the bioregions of Brazil around the watersheds.
20:41And then they organize within there addressing real human needs.
20:45So provisioning systems, classic examples are community solar, regenerative agriculture, which is a lot more.
20:54And then we build that as a community wealth around that, embedded within the local ecosystems.
21:03This goes by many names, and that's fine.
21:07Nobody cares what names you go.
21:09So some go for food sovereignty or transition towns in the U.S.
21:15Brazil has a lot of these projects going on.
21:18And some of them, they do identify as bioregionalists.
21:21In fact, one of the most advanced bioregionalist projects are here in Brazil.
21:29So what does it mean for a company then to organize like nature?
21:34Well, first of all, everything in nature contributes to the web of life.
21:39So that should be the first change.
21:41You can still be profit-making.
21:45That's very important.
21:47As soon as I say, well, you're making profit to serve your higher purpose.
21:52You're not a charity, but it's a difference between profit-making and profit-maximization every three quarters.
22:01That is going to be problematic.
22:04So we have a lot of these companies that are doing quite well.
22:08And for example, a good example of that is efficiency.
22:12We've heard a lot about efficiencies.
22:16We are at an all-time high in carbon emissions.
22:20Yet we've seen massive efficiencies increases.
22:23And they've all been outpaced by GDP growth.
22:26So because we're in a growth system, so of course we're going to do that.
22:30Right?
22:31You can do two things if you have efficiency.
22:33You can produce more with the same amount of work and resources.
22:37Or you can produce the same with less work and less resource use.
22:42In a growth system, you're always going to do it first.
22:47Well-being companies would often choose the latter.
22:50So you still have profit, but you're only making it if you are contributing to well-being.
22:56If it doesn't, you don't do it.
22:59And while we're on the top of efficiency, nature balances efficiency with resilience.
23:09And if I'm right, and I think most of you in the audience, and we're going into tumultuous times,
23:18your business models are way too fragile right now.
23:22You need some redundancy in a system to be resilient.
23:27And so this quest for more efficiency has made your business very vulnerable.
23:32Supply chains are a classic example.
23:35that there might be a little bit of a cost efficiency from resources halfway around the planet,
23:42but in tumultuous times, what bioregionalism does,
23:45the emphasis on local sourcing will way, much outweigh all these short-term cost benefits that you accrued.
24:01So, if this feels still a bit far-fetched,
24:07I would say that's how far we've strayed from our nature,
24:12because this is what we've been doing as long as the homogeneous was around.
24:17This is actually what we do best, and you can still see that we have the Paleolithic brain.
24:26We still have that same one when we were living in very egalitarian ways,
24:31very low levels of violence, by the way, because there were no wars about resources.
24:36And the Paleolithic was not a stable climate, and there was an ice age and everything.
24:41And we weathered that because we are so good as a community to co-creating provisioning systems for everybody's needs.
24:50This is what we do best, and it still resurfaces when the order is disrupted.
24:56So, in a disaster, we're used to two provisioning systems, right?
25:03So, private sector and the government, those are the first responders, but the zero responders are the community.
25:12And it's so interesting what happens when this order is disrupted by an event like a flood or an earthquake.
25:21And we're not at all like the people in the movies.
25:24Do you know the zombie apocalypse movies?
25:26It always starts the same, and there's like a close-up of a woman going,
25:31and everybody's running around, and there's mass panic.
25:34Nobody talks to each other.
25:35It's not actually what we do.
25:37So, what you see in disasters, as soon as the imminent danger is gone,
25:43people start to take inventory.
25:45How are you?
25:46What do we need?
25:47What do we have?
25:48And people just like open up their houses.
25:52People ferry victims out, supplies back.
25:56That is what we do.
25:58And we can still tap into that.
26:00In fact, I think that's what collapsed resilience comes down to.
26:05Collapse is not an event.
26:07It's a process.
26:09But we will have a declining delivery of provisioning systems of the old system.
26:15And so, we have to rebuild, by what is currently a very atrophied muscle,
26:21of community-led provisioning systems.
26:26And I think that's the opportunity that we see here in collapse.
26:31As Cambridge scholar Luke Kemp puts it, more than anything, collapse is a flattening of hierarchies.
26:44Our brains, again, are not accustomed to this much inequality.
26:49And we'll start to function in many ways better once those are gone.
26:54So, this notion that we should be afraid of collapse to some extent is the vision of the 1%
27:02who has by far the most to lose.
27:04Now, I don't want to minimize the suffering and destruction that comes with collapse.
27:13But the current system also causes a lot of suffering and destruction.
27:18And so, with the collapse also comes unprecedented potential for renewal to do things differently.
27:32In these opening cracks of the legacy system, from it arises a new sense of agency for us to shape
27:44the direction of our common future.
27:48To live more freely and courageously.
27:52To shift our mindset from never enough to enough for each.
28:00Instead of looking to outer space to start new, more colonies.
28:06We just, planetary boundaries are reminding us, it's time to come back in.
28:10It's time to come home.
28:13And work where you are with what is.
28:18And, of course, who you are with.
28:22And that's the opportunity that this offers.
28:27If the change is coming anyway, this is, for us, an opportunity to live together, to find new connection.
28:40We will have less stuff, but more of what we really need.
28:44A connection with ourselves, with one another, and with nature.
28:50In short, we'd be more fully human.
28:58Now, it's not guaranteed that this will happen.
29:02We know what's going on.
29:04We're heading in a very different direction in pockets around the world.
29:09And I don't know if it will happen in Brazil.
29:14But I do know that you can.
29:17And I think most of you want it.
29:22And if this happens for Brazil, then it will have been because people like I gathered here today will have
29:31contributed to that outcome in their own ways.
29:35So, thank you for listening.
29:37Thank you for listening.
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