Bill Rees on how to reach zero growth

Step 1: admit our addiction

Wendy Natt, Mar 19, 09.

Bill Rees, University of British Columbia Professor of Community and Regional Planning and originator of the ecological footprint concept, has assembled a small team of sustainability experts known as the One Earth Initiative to research and develop the idea of a zero-material growth-economy. Vancouver Magazine interviewed Rees about the zero-growth concept, an idea that economist Herman Daly described in his 1977 book Steady-State Economics as a state of equilibrium achieved between production, consumption, and the supporting ecosystem. Rees talks about the dangers of our current pattern of grossly exceeding our planet’s carrying capacity, and why he thinks the shift to a no-growth economy (not the same as stagnation, he emphasizes) is a change we must learn to make soon if we want to continue to live in a civilized manner.

A zero-growth economy “can continue to develop and evolve, i.e., to get better,” he says, “It simply stops getting dangerously materially bigger.”

Rees fears that the change in thinking and behavior required to create a steady-state economy may not begin to happen until conditions get far worse, after our excesses in consumption have irreversibly damaged our ecosystem. He says that a major disaster may be the thing that breaks down the old paradigm, a shock great enough to unlink the mindset that propels American-style production and consumerism. But this does not have to be our fate, he says:

“My dream is that we avoid that catastrophic ending, that we can come to consciousness in time to avoid the implosion of the global system. What a horrible thing to think that we’ve come this far only to stick the knife in our own heart.”

Reese was one of the invited speakers at Rice University’s De Lange Conference VII on sustainable cities earlier this month.

(photo credit: UBC School of Community and Regional Planning)