I’ve lived in Albemarle County, Virginia, for over forty years. Albemarle is a mostly rural county in the Piedmont region. It surrounds the city of Charlottesville.
For decades, the county valued its open spaces and created many policies to ensure their protection. Recently, leadership has taken a pro-development turn, jeopardizing citizens’ quality of life and many of our community’s natural features.
In the 1990s and 2000s,
Given his long-running obsession with GDP growth, an obsession punctuated with mid-terms in mind, President Trump has made some peculiar moves. Just this week, his stripping of immigrant truckers’ licenses took effect, as part of a broader crackdown on immigrant labor, a key source of economic growth. His hyperactive imposing of tariffs has undermined comparative advantage, a condition relied upon for global GDP growth.
The size of our economy, measured by gross domestic product (GDP), is intimately linked to our use of artificial fertilizer. So is the ecological havoc we are wreaking on the planet and its inhabitants.
Between 2002 and 2018, while the population increased by 22 percent, the per-hectare use of synthetic nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium fertilizers—the three most common types—increased by about 23,
The Trump Administration, in its dedication to self- and industry enrichment, is hoping to sell a sacred cow: public lands. And while many such efforts have been defeated in the past, the current no-holds-barred growth regime elevates their chances of success.
Federal lands are set aside in all 50 U.S. states for the benefit of all Americans. Primarily in the American West, these lands span 640 million acres of natural resources,
The EU countries, India, and China are among the nations where representatives have concluded that “Unsustainable economic activity and a focus on growth…has been a driver of the decline of biodiversity.” This conclusion is expressed by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), comprising high-level scientists and diplomats from over 150 member states. The IPBES helps to empower national governments—from heads of state to bureaucrats in civil service—to recognize the conflict between economic growth and biodiversity conservation.
Rutherford County is located in the central Tennessee farm belt. Its county seat, Murfreesboro, is precisely in the state’s geographic center, and it briefly served as Tennessee’s capital. But, because of greater commerce and superior roads, the legislature chose Nashville as the seat of power only a few years after statehood was granted in 1796. Decades later, Murfreesboro became a grim center of the Civil War. It was the site of the Battle of Stones River—a pivotal Union victory bought at the cost of immense casualties.
Due to a broad-based set of environmental, economic, and social concerns, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) is proposing a moratorium on the construction of new AI data centers. In a 4-minute video, Sanders asks his audience to consider: Who is pushing for these data centers? What will AI and robotics do to working families? How will people survive if they have no income? He’s not saying that AI, robotics, and data centers must be shut down permanently,
Among 30 nations assessed by the Hinrich Foundation, which would you think has the biggest ecological footprint? The United States? China? Russia? No, it’s Singapore, and by quite a margin. This results from its “high population density, urbanized economy, and heavy dependence on imports.” This must come as a big surprise to aficionados of a “green-growing” information economy. However, it’s no surprise to ecological economists, given the trophic theory of money. Singapore would have one of the highest trophic scores in the history of nations.
Swiss citizens have spoken. They want a cap on the population of Switzerland. While portrayed in the conventional press as a “right-wing” initiative, a population cap is also a fundamental shift toward a steady state economy. Boiled down to its most basic equation, a steady state economy is stabilized population times per capita consumption. So, if the Swiss initiative prevails in the June referendum, you might say that Switzerland will be half a steady state away.
Bringing about alternatives to our capitalist growth system at the speed and scale needed is no easy task. The herculean work to develop transformative worldviews, including theories toward a steady state economy, is ongoing and increasingly cross-sectoral. At the core of this endeavor is the recognition that we cannot implement alternatives to growth capitalism without first addressing cultural and social dynamics deeply rooted in colonialism and cultural appropriation.