by Rob Dietz
A curious thing happened recently when I was driving home from a weekend camping trip with my daughter in the Cascade Mountains. We came around a tight curve and the road opened into a long straightaway. Far up ahead, I could see a small animal perched right on top of the double yellow line that divides the lanes. As we got a bit closer, I recognized it as a chipmunk and asked my daughter if she could see it (spotting animals is a favorite pastime on car and bike rides).
As our vehicle was bearing down on the little critter, it looked up and started to head toward the left shoulder of the road. But, obeying some muddled directive from its brain, it spun around and started heading to the right. Not content with that change of direction, it went back left again. I honked the horn to make sure it knew we were getting close. The chipmunk then proceeded to do an erratic dance, leaning left then right then left again. Finally, it just sat back down in the middle of the road atop the double yellow line. The wheels of our car whizzed by its delicate body at a speed that the chipmunk couldn’t grasp.

Care to guess which one's the smartest?
Checking the rear-view mirror, I saw it saunter to the side of the road and stroll into the woods, looking completely unfazed by its brush with disaster. After witnessing this eccentric behavior, I began wondering why the chipmunk would behave so illogically. It didn’t take too long to realize that it simply doesn’t possess the right equipment to understand the threat posed by a car. A chipmunk’s brain and the behavior produced by it are the result of ages of natural selection – a process that took place in the absence of roads and cars. The mind of a chipmunk, therefore, is incapable of properly interpreting the data coming its way, especially when it’s coming at 60 miles per hour.
The chipmunk’s maladaptive behavior has some prominent parallels with our own predicament. The data are approaching us at a fast and furious clip. We have ample and disturbing evidence about climate destabilization, dwindling energy resources, social breakdowns, and a host of environmental maladies. We know that the economy is a subsystem of the finite planet, and that increasing the scale of the economy impinges on the earth’s ecosystems. In an age of biodiversity die-offs and political buy-offs, however, we don’t seem to possess the wherewithal to interpret the data correctly.
A few years ago, Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert wrote a fascinating opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times (July 2, 2007). In the article, he brilliantly summarizes some shortcomings of the human brain when it comes to interpreting the danger posed by global warming. He notes that the human brain evolved to respond to threats with four features, features that the threat of global warming lacks:
- We respond to threats with a human face. To quote Gilbert: “If climate change had been visited on us by a brutal dictator or an evil empire, the war on warming would be this nation’s top priority.”
- We respond to threats that outrage our moral sensibilities and that produce a sense of repulsion or disgust in us. Gilbert: “The fact is that if climate change were caused by… the practice of eating kittens, millions of protesters would be massing in the streets.”
- We respond to immediate threats that are right in front of us. “We haven’t quite gotten the knack of treating the future like the present it will soon become because we’ve only been practicing for a few million years. If global warming took out an eye every now and then, OSHA would regulate it into nonexistence.”
- We respond to threatening changes around us that happen rapidly. “Because we barely notice changes that happen gradually, we accept gradual changes that we would reject if they happened abruptly.”
For most of us, economic growth is an even tougher threat to interpret and take seriously than global warming (even though the former is a root cause of the latter). As Bill McKibben highlighted in his book Deep Economy, bigger and better used to go hand in hand, economically speaking. But over generations, the consequences of exponential economic growth have outstripped the benefits. What used to be a boon is now a bane, and the threat is upon us; overgrown economies are undermining the life-support systems of the planet, but we simply aren’t sensing it and responding appropriately.
It’s no simple feat to determine when an economy has reached its optimal size – the inflection point when it should transition from growth to a steady state. An individual organism (e.g., a chipmunk or a person) has an unconscious and almost magical ability to do this, to stop growing and become a grownup. Human economies don’t possess the same unconscious when-to-stop mechanism. The people who make up the economy must collectively decide to reach maturity consciously.
The question now is how much longer humanity will choose to sit on the double yellow line as the consequences of runaway growth scream down the road at us doing a zillion miles per hour. Or to paraphrase, are people smarter than chipmunks?

Note that the game is far along already; global GDP is about $62 trillion. So when they decided to write Protection of Polar Regions, what were the authors thinking? Most folks have already given up on polar protection. Polar bears are leading a long, sad procession of species off the poles, into the darkness of extinction. The list of polar contaminants increases with each new study. Nations and oil companies are staking their claims on the oceanic oilfields, newly accessible amidst the melting ice. Perhaps the best summary of polar problems is, “Etcetera, etcetera.”



Not surprisingly, the United States flunks the test of meeting these standards. Take, for example, the first. Highway accidents each year in the U.S. claim the lives of about 40,000 people, and several hundred thousand more are seriously injured. Contrast this tragic record with Japan’s bullet trains. The speedy 322-mile route from Tokyo to Osaka, completed in 1964, has not had a single passenger fatality. Today 1,360 miles of high-speed rail link all of Japan’s cities.
Take a look at this recent cover from O The Oprah Magazine. At first glance, it appears to espouse an ideal compatible with a steady state economy. The banner says boldly, “De-clutter your life! It’s time to simplify things – Oprah’s starting with her closet*.” I won’t make any comments here about the quantity (or quality) of stuff in Oprah’s closet, but I will point out the riptide that’s contained in the not-so-innocent asterisk at the end of the banner. The asterisk connects to text that says, “Her bags, her shoes… Your chance to bid and win! O’s Great Online Auction.” So Oprah wants to de-clutter her life, but you should clutter yours with all her excessive stuff. Perhaps bidders can get a good deal, and perhaps Oprah is donating the proceeds to a good cause, but the underlying directive is still, “Consume!”

How does Burke help put Walter on the path to healing? (Cue the triumphant music) He takes Walter and the rest of the seminar attendees on a shopping spree to Home Depot. For a substantial portion of this film, the viewer is treated to smiling people cruising around the hardware store picking out all the wonderful items that a general contractor needs to get back to work. Yes sir, a solid day of shopping is really all you need to get over the death of your son. That outrageous message took me completely out of the film experience. I was stunned by this shameless attempt to couple strong emotions of redemption with the purchase of a hammer and a toolbelt.
“Steady state economy” – it’s got a nice ring, doesn’t it? In a world of financial meltdowns, climate change, resource wars, banker bailouts, endangered species, BP, etc., the ring gets nicer by the day, no? With unpredictability and insecurity eating away at the collective peace of mind, “steady state economy” exudes stability, security, and sustainability. It’s a phrase for which the time has come!
Economists have traditionally considered nature to be infinite relative to the economy, and therefore not scarce, and therefore properly priced at zero. But the biosphere is now scarce, and becoming more so every day as a result of growth of its large and dependent subsystem, the macro-economy. As the macro-economy expands into the ecosystem it displaces what was there before, namely habitat of other species (and of indigenous and poor members of our own species). Consequently, biodiversity decline is a salient index of the increasing scarcity of nature, as is involuntary resettlement of people to make way for dams, mines, soybeans, and cattle; and of course increasing depletion and pollution. Sacrifice of nature’s scarce services constitutes an increasing opportunity cost of growth, and that in turn means that nature must be priced, either explicitly or implicitly. But to whom should this price be paid? Nature would prefer not to sell herself, but if forced to it by growth, would at least like to divide equally among her children the revenue from the forced sale of her previous gifts. From the point of view of efficiency it does not matter who receives the price, as long as it is counted and paid by the users. But from the point of view of equity it matters a great deal who receives the price for nature’s increasingly scarce services. Such payment is the ideal source of funds with which to finance public goods, and to redistribute to the poor.
The above seems to be the basic insight of early American economist Henry George (1839-1897) who applied it specifically to rent on the scarcity of desirable locations of land rather than to rents on natural resource scarcity in general. Could we not extend Henry George’s logic to resources in general? For resources the necessary supply price is the cost of extraction — so any payment above cost of extraction is rent. Since land has no cost of extraction all payment for land is rent. If no rent is paid, land does not cease to exist. Neoclassical economists accept this definition of rent but resist Henry George’s ethical emphasis on rent as
The BP spill demands a far more significant response than ongoing cleanups, unsuccessful attempts to plug the gushing oil, and desperate efforts to mitigate the multitude of impacts from the biggest oil catastrophe in U.S. history. The BP spill demands a paradigm shift in how we run our economy and carry out our governance. Historians will one day look back on this spill as the nadir of governmental regulatory performance, in which oil companies commandeered and corrupted the Interior Department oil leasing program. So what’s the response we need to get the paradigm shift going? How about declaring a new holiday?
So instead of fundamental change, the most likely Congressional response to the BP spill will be to go back and write a new liability law for oil.
It is not just in the energy sector that we see prices failing to reflect their ecological costs, but across the food, health, and safety spectrum. What is the real cost of our food and of the animal factory slum operations that brutalize animals and shove their health and pollution impacts off on neighboring communities? What is the real condition of our topsoil and our groundwater? What is the real index of social and economic well-being, given that GDP (gross domestic product) only measures throughput in the economy with little accounting for the future?
I am entirely addicted to watching World Cup soccer. It’s the greatest sporting event on the planet – each match is a high-stakes struggle with international intrigue and unpredictable endings. It’s hard to top the build-up and excitement of a last minute goal that means the difference between going home and moving on to the next round (see the U.S. goal against Slovenia during the group stage). But perhaps the extreme effort from Ghana against the U.S., featuring magnificent runs and fearsome goals, did exactly that. It was amazing to see the Ghana players perform, especially while carrying the hopes of an entire continent on their shoulders (or should I say feet?). Ok, so I’m a fan of the World Cup, but what does that have to do with a steady state economy?
That brings me back to soccer. It’s known around the world as “the beautiful game.” No, it’s not the overly colorful uniforms and 