Year 3, Month 9, Day 2: Your Lovin’ Give Me Such A Thrill…

The Eugene, Oregon Register Guard features an article by one Jan Spencer, who seems to get it, whatever “it” is:

An article in the Aug. 6 Register-Guard described a study for Eugene’s Climate and Energy Action Plan. The study focused on climate change, but many of the findings reveal public perceptions about economics and lifestyle that extend far beyond that issue. These findings can be helpful for crafting a community plan to mitigate climate change and many additional social and environmental concerns.

Study findings include:

A solid majority of people in Eugene believe climate change is human-caused and poses a catastrophic risk.

Many consider a healthy environment to be more important than a growing economy.

A majority in Eugene believe typical American lifestyles place far too much emphasis on buying and consuming.

Well said. Sent August 27:

When Jan Spencer notes that a significant number of citizens find “a healthy environment to be more important than a growing economy,” she puts her finger on one of a fundamental truth about humanity’s presence on Earth: we live on a finite planet. We may briefly delude ourselves that infinite economic growth is both possible and desirable, but the inherent unsustainability of a continuously metastasizing economy becomes obvious when we take into account the collateral costs which are usually omitted from the equation. To take the most substantial examples, fossil fuel energy is only cheap because we don’t consider its environmental, public health, and geopolitical costs. Once these become part of the picture, it’s obvious that our current energy economy is self-destructing before our eyes.

Economic sustainability, by definition, builds on a conception of the common good over the long term. If our species is to survive in the post-climate-change Anthropocene Era, we must change our thinking to reflect this. Continuous weight gain is healthy for an infant, but not for an adult; when our economy was in its fledgling stages, all that growth was excellent. Now? Not so much.

The threats posed by climate change and environmental destruction (both epiphenomena of our attempts to maintain a continuously growing economy) tend to confirm Edward Abbey’s prescient comment that “growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”

Warren Senders