Degrowth, abortion, and environmental sustainability.

 

Dear Editor,

Sunday’s Washington Post editorial “Degrowth” [https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/06/21/degrowth-climate/] and Kate Cohen’s opinion on Dobbs v Jackson [https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/06/21/roe-dobbs-abortion-rights-two-year-anniversary/] are profoundly connected and relevant to the 4^th of July.   Degrowth is dedicated to protecting the environment.  And a women’s birthing rights are vital to protecting nature.  But protecting both will never be sustainable given the seemingly irreversible dysfunctions of our government, the UN, and our mind’s cognitive dissonance.   Environmental harm is not a function of economic growth or birth rates.   It’s a function of harmful consumer habits.   We only protect what we love.  But loving degrowth won’t serve the environment or our posterity by loving our wasteful ways and flawed concepts more.

Our reactionary policies to population and fetus growth are the problem.  For the last five years many smart minds feared ‘Overpopulation’ with a logical but flawed assumption that hunger is a result of too many people and not enough food.  I once believed that, taught it to my students, and argued it with anyone prioritizing profit over nature.  In 1978 I learned the truth.   Humanity had (and still has) the financial and natural resources to end hunger but our governing systems only lack the “political will”.   This was the conclusion of three reports.  The Brandt Commission, the National Academy of Sciences report, and last in a 1980 Presidential Commission on World Hunger.  This bi-partisan Commission warned, “The most potentially explosive force in the world today is the frustrated desire of poor people to attain a decent standard of living. The anger, despair, and often hatred that result represent real and persistent threats to international order… Neither the cost to national security of allowing malnutrition to spread nor the gain to be derived by a genuine effort to resolve the problem can be predicted or measured in any precise, mathematical way. Nor can monetary value be placed on avoiding the chaos that will ensue unless the United States and the rest of the world begin to develop a common institutional framework for meeting such other critical global threats… Calculable or not, however, this combination of problems now threatens the national security of all countries just as surely as advancing armies or nuclear arsenals.”  And then it stated, “that promoting economic development in general, and overcoming hunger in particular, are tasks far more critical to the U.S. national security than most policymakers acknowledge or even believe. Since the advent of nuclear weapons, most Americans have been conditioned to equate national security with the strength of strategic military forces. The Commission considers this prevailing belief to be a simplistic illusion. Armed might represents merely the physical aspect of national security. Military force is ultimately useless in the absence of the global security that only coordinated international progress toward social justice can bring.”   They went on to specifically warn of increases in “diseases”, “international terrorism”, “war”, “environmental problems” and “other human rights problems”.  

Back then the primary driver of excessive births was high infant mortality rates (IMR). Since 1980 objective science has proven that the economic wealth and health of poor parents and their children will reduce the need for their parents’ ‘insurance’ births to ensure one male child to aid them in their elder years.   And motivated healthy and sufficiently wealthy people have the motivation to protect their children’s future.  If we with money have the wisdom to invest our limited individual financial resources into existing green technologies and fuel growth in research and development creating more that mimic the genius of nature’s evolution, humanity could yield sufficient healthy food, clean power, and unprecedented comforts to all humanity sustainably for more than 10 billion people without a decline of populations by war, genocide, pandemics, or extreme weather events.  Unfortunately, these are now causing hunger to grow.

Unfortunately, some of the smartest people continue to argue that population reduction is the key to a sustainable future.  But it’s not the number of people that is destroying our species vital natural infrastructure.  It’s the wasteful consumption patterns of us in the wealthiest nations.  We must value the lives of others and all children’s future more than protecting our wasteful habits.

Degrowthers are right only if current wasteful consumption methods are sustained.  But if humanities unprecedented wealth is devoted to achieving the UN 17 Sustainable Development Goals our economy would grow.  That won’t happen with reactionary thinking.  A global Garden of Eden (and healthy eating) on earth is possible, along with liberty and justice for all if we have the political will.

The greatest barrier to this remains our delusional beliefs that our current national and global governance systems.  Both prioritize protecting national sovereignty and corporations over human rights and the environment.  These systems founded on the illusion of independence cannot protect both our freedoms and security.  This delusional mental construct exists nowhere in the known universe because “Everything is connected, everything is interdependent, so everything is vulnerable.... And that’s why this has to be a more than whole of government, a more than whole of nation [effort]. It really has to be a global effort....”.  Jen Easterly, the Director of our nation’s newest Federal Agency CISA (the Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency) said this in a speech Oct. 29, 2021.  Trying to enforce independence these systems cannot protect our freedoms, security, and environmental sustainably.  And all we will get is accelerating chaos, violence, and other harmful unsustainable trends.

This 4^th of July Americans will be celebrating the anniversary of the most profound document in human history, the Declaration of Independence.  Its wisdom still offers humanity what is essential to achieving all seven of the aspirations in our U.S. Constitution’s preamble.   The Declaration’s first sentence states “When in the Course of Human events” we can “assume among the Powers of the Earth”...‘”the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” to empower us and achieve greatness.   Yet we persist in refusing to take care of nature and each other while with every religion in the world is founded on the “Golden Rule”.

The Declaration’s second paragraph starts “WE hold these Truths to be Self-evident”.  Yet US policy makers swear an oath to protect the Constitution - falsely believing it can achieve the universal aspirations in its preamble.  The Declaration’s signers stressed that virtue is needed to sustain our freedoms.  Yet those same signers engineered slavery (a profound lack of virtue) into the Constitution putting states' rights above human rights.  Now our Supreme Court championed states' rights again with their Dobbs v. Jackson ruling allowing states to removing a Women’s inalienable right to control their own body in some ‘independent’ states thus limiting their access to safe abortions or family planning.  This is a life sentence five times more lethal than an abortion.  

Meanwhile wars, genocides, infectious diseases, natural disasters, and the lack of clean water/safe sanitation cause more aborted fetuses, dead children, environmental destruction, and loss of basic human rights that our governing systems allow.   If we are truly committed to a free, secure, prosperous, and sustainable future for ourselves and our posterity we should insist every day that ‘everything is connected, interdependent, and vulnerable....and a global effort is needed.  And persist in insisting that businesses prioritize funding the 17 SDGs - because governments are too indebted, and charities can’t afford it.   If businesses step up and consumers prioritize purchases that grow heathy people and communities, then capitalism, profit making, and personal comforts will become sustainable for all.    

Humanity is far behind on meeting most of the 168 specific and measurable goals within the 17 SDGs.   Few Americans have even heard of them.  Given the global evolution of weaponry, war, and political polarization the SDGs need to be our highest priority.   With the growth of wise and sufficient investments ahead of our cognitive dissonance and depression about the future.

Abraham Lincoln wrote that the Declaration is our “Apple of Gold”.  And our Constitution its “Silver Frame”.   It is up to “we the people” this November to champion the Apple of Gold and fix the flaws in its silver frame.   The apple led to the foundation of our nation. The frame does no justice domestically or globally.