Alex Steffen writes a piece over at World Changing that sets off a tumble of links and thoughts this morning.  He raises the question of whether we narrow the problem of climate change by treating it exclusively as an energy supply issue.   That we do, of course — he makes a fairly obvious point about considering efficiency (that’s a huge piece of the Energy Revolution plan which Sven Teska has put together for Greenpeace and has well saturated my thinking already) but then also raises the question of lifestyle.  Not individual lifestyle, but creating a “compact and efficient society.”   That is, recontexting a clean energy programme into a “smart growth” or “societal design” programme .

In the thread of comments to that piece,  someone links to a Tim O’Reilly piece which quotes’ “In distrust of movements” from Wendell Berry, one of my favourite poet/thinkers/activists.   It’s an essay from a few years back that made an impression on me then, and has a new freshness now for anyone thinking about how to keep the world’s temperature below a 2 degree increase.   The title drives specifically toward Berry’s distrust of soil conservation movements, but more generally about  what he sees as a category failure of any form of activism which seeks to solve part of an environmental problem without dealing with the bigger picture: the human economy and  industrialism itself. 

In seeking to change our economic use of the world, we are seeking inescapably to change our lives. The outward harmony that we desire between our economy and the world depends finally upon an inward harmony between our own hearts and the originating spirit that is the life of all creatures, a spirit as near us as our flesh and yet forever beyond the measures of this obsessively measuring age. We can grow good wheat and make good bread only if we understand that we do not live by bread alone.

[...]

The proper business of a human economy is to make one whole thing of ourselves and this world.

I click a few more links and find myself on Bruce Stirling’s blog, and after a few sidetrips out into the centre of the galaxy I stumble upon his link to yet another Tim O’Reilly piece, The Biggest Ponzi Scheme of Them All and a lovely piece of economic heresy from Herman Daly:

A failed growth economy and a steady-state economy are not the same thing; they are the very different alternatives we face. The Earth as a whole is approximately a steady state. Neither the surface nor the mass of the earth is growing or shrinking; the inflow of radiant energy to the Earth is equal to the outflow; and material imports from space are roughly equal to exports (both negligible). None of this means that the earth is static—a great deal of qualitative change can happen inside a steady state, and certainly has happened on Earth. The most important change in recent times has been the enormous growth of one subsystem of the Earth, namely the economy, relative to the total system, the ecosphere.

This huge shift from an “empty” to a “full” world is truly “something new under the sun” as historian J. R. McNeil calls it in his book of that title. The closer the economy approaches the scale of the whole Earth the more it will have to conform to the physical behavior mode of the Earth. That behavior mode is a steady state—a system that permits qualitative development but not aggregate quantitative growth. Growth is more of the same stuff; development is the same amount of better stuff (or at least different stuff). The remaining natural world no longer is able to provide the sources and sinks for the metabolic throughput necessary to sustain the existing oversized economy—much less a growing one.

There’s an intellectual rightness about these ways of thinking.  But there’s an activist practicality consideration that I run up against. At an activist organisation like Greenpeace, we may have a common diagnosis of the big picture problem and even some shared ideas about how to address it.  But one of the things that drove me to Greenpeace rather than some of the more utopian organisations I’ve shared hugs with over the years was that hard-headed ability to recognise the scale of the problem that you can tackle with available resources, and adjust toward winnable objectives.  You need to break a problem down into components, and sometimes you need a wide variety of agents of change attacking things from different angles.  None of them individually is a satisfactory answer to the big problem, but collectively they make up that holistic form of movement that’s closer to Berry’s idea.

Still, in the same way that individual ants may have individual objectives (shred this leaf,  roll that gumball bolder) it’s worth thinking about the shape of the ant-hill you and your fellow-travellers are trying to create, and these ideas of the kind of economy we want to invent for the world are in the zone of describing in more detail what a green and peaceful future might look like.