Mother Jones recently had an immensely interesting piece about the impossibility of assuming that the earth can support endless economic growth. To date, economists at both ends of the political spectrum have implicitly assumed that ‘growth is good’ and inevitable. Economic growth has been viewed as the natural state, much in the same way that conservative economists think of capitalism as ‘organic’ and similar to nature in its imperative to grow and adjust to adverse conditions.

A York University economist named Peter Victor decided to find out whether it was possible to have a healthy economy that doesn’t grow — an idea that emerges as the fundamental requirement for the long-term survival of our species on this planet if we agree that the other two options (poverty due to negative growth, or ecological disaster as a result of continued unlimited exploitation of our natural resources) are not acceptable outcomes.

[Victor] created a computer model replicating the modern Canadian economy. Then he tweaked it so that crucial elements — including consumption, productivity, and population — gradually stopped growing after 2010. To stave off unemployment, he shortened the workweek to roughly four days, creating more jobs. He also set up higher taxes on the rich and more public services for the poor, and imposed a carbon tax to fill government coffers and discourage the use of fossil fuels. The upshot? It took a couple of decades, but unemployment eventually fell to 4 percent, most people’s standards of living actually rose, and greenhouse gas emissions decreased to well below Kyoto levels. The economy reached a “steady state.” And if the model is accurate, then something like it, say some ecologically minded economists, may be the only way for humanity to survive in the long term. (From Mother Jones article)

Unless we belong to that marginal ‘science fiction’ faction of capitalists who still believe that we’ll figure out how to terra-form and colonize Mars before we run out of resources here on earth, we instinctively know that the idea of aiming for an economic steady state is right and makes sense. We also instinctively know that it would address many of modern developed society’s small and large aches and pains.

Of course, there are numerous forces that pull us in different directions, demanding we surrender the concept of steady state as soon as we have grasped onto it. For example, the developing world’s inability to conceive of a reality where it surrenders its ‘innate’ right to economic growth (the history of colonialism entitles the developing world to claim its own piece of the growth pie, and nobody from the developed world may question this without being labeled a heretic). China, the Indian subcontinent, much of Latin America and most of Africa are already an environmental catastrophe, but it doesn’t seem permissible to make this part of the public discourse of economics.

A similarly insidious psychological mechanism is at play in much of the tech industry. For decades, we’ve known that manufacturing computer equipment comes at great cost to the environment. Along with most other trappings of First World comfort, we’ve moved the making of computers and electronics off shore, ostensibly to make it cheaper — but also, of course, because if it happens elsewhere, it doesn’t really affect our immediate natural surroundings. We still sit with solving the quandary of how to rid ourselves of used-up devices at the end of their lifecycle, but that’s only one half of the whole equation.

In the last few years, we’ve read increasingly alarmist reports about how the datacentres where the Googles, Microsofts and Yahoo!s of this world keep their tens of thousands of servers consume untold quantities of hydro and other resources to serve up the services we’ve come to take for granted as part of the ‘knowledge economy.’ This most recent form of capitalism is literally powered by its direct impact on the environment (cheap hardware created from diminishing natural resources and cheap hydro created from non-renewable sources).

Even the most evolved and enlightened of tech entrepreneurs continue to operate under the basic assumptions of the ‘old economy.’ It doesn’t matter whether we say we don’t care about where the servers are and how they are powered (a typical software/cloud startup sort of thing to say). It probably matters little that we put our servers at a ‘green’ hosting company (as long as we can afford it… the ‘economics’ of it are pure luxury in a competitive world).

Fundamentally, it’s an easy illusion to perpetuate, to suggest there is no other set of assumptions under which someone seeking to forge his or her trajectory in the economy can proceed. Growth is the objective of creating a company, offering goods or services for sale, going to work every day. There have recently been some noises about socially and ecologically conscious businesses: the assertion is that the only thing that motivates us enough to try and create meaningful responses to the problems of late industrial capitalism is the promise of wealth. While the interim tactical results may indeed produce viable solutions, growth as the core motivator may also prevent these solutions from ever becoming truly widespread. As we all know, every large organization eventually turns ‘evil’ and no matter how dedicated a world-changer you may start out as, you eventually turn into ‘the man’ (cf. Steve Jobs).

So what’s the answer? I think that building ecological consciousness in each and every one of us is key. Like the increasing acceptance as ‘normal’ of feminism in 21st century public discourse or our 250-year journey toward finding a rational basis for politics and cementing the separation of church and state, our transformation from being motivated by growth towards being motivated by our collective survival will happen because it must. Important memes that are initially decried as radical by everyone will eventually prevail because they’re right.

Deepening our understanding of how fundamentally ‘growth’ is embedded in everything we do, buy, eat, make and use is the first step. I encounter an increasing number of people who are genuinely shocked by what they discover about our industrial food supply when they read books like Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma. When matters of economics are directly linked to the health and well-being of our bodies, we become more inclined to pay attention.

A similar transformation will occur once we grasp the full extent of the trap of plentiful and cheap consumer goods such as toys, clothes, shoes and electronics. Making the connection is harder when it comes to material possessions because they are often not only the things that provide our creature comforts but also the physical expression of what we like to believe we are. An iPad or MacBook is as much a manifestation of our participation of the enlightened knowledge economy as it is a computing device or tool. In our personal lives, we will become more conscious once we

• Start buying the most ecologically conscious products we can afford and keep them for a long time
• Become more deliberate about recycling our tech cast-offs by donating them, giving them away to someone who will actually use them or transferring them to a ‘green’ tech recycling centre
• Just decide to get a smaller car with a smaller engine, take transit or bite the bullet and buy a hybrid vehicle even if it is more expensive than the gas equivalent
• Etc.

The hard part is not really to do these things but to wrap one’s head around doing them and becoming deliberate about it to the exclusion of all judgment and laughter from others. (I’m not saying for one minute that I’ve figured this part out. Growth’s fundamental mechanism is implanting the desire for things in us.)

In the tech industry, we ought to expand our notion of ‘best practices’ to continually question the economic and ecological impact of our decisions — both as individual practitioners and companies (startups, professional services firms, software vendors, etc.). The questions we should ask ourselves are related to performing good work and providing excellent outcomes that don’t necessarily result in unintended growth imperatives. For example, should we continue to suport software vendors whose software continually evolves to require bigger, faster and more expensive hardware without offering substantially better features? Not only is this financial folly, but it also has a negative impact on the environment. We tend to write these run-on effects off as the inevitability of Moore’s Law, but that doesn’t absolve us of the responsibility to question our own role in them.

Other examples of where we might have personal impact through our work include:

• Designing software with high usability in mind, allowing users to accomplish tasks faster (and switching off their computers more often)
• Designing hardware with built-in electricity-saving features
• Designing hardware that uses ethically obtained, high-quality materials and providing frequent software updates to ‘keep it new,’ thereby preventing users from becoming tired of it and discarding it
• Advising our customers to actually leverage the potential of meeting remotely (so many organizations I consult to know all about Skype and LiveMeeting but just don’t think the technology is mature enough — or right for them)
• Choosing software platforms that aren’t committed to the typical trajectory of upgrading to newer software and hardware every two years if the nature of the task accomplished doesn’t itself change (the fact that the vendor has ended mainstream support for a product should never be the motivation for buying a new one).
• Etc.

Re-reading the passage from Mother Jones above, I for one look forward to a steady state economic future. Not only because of the inevitable noble goal of our survival as a species (hard not to get behind that one, really), but also because of the very attractive ‘fringe benefits.’ The Mother Jones piece explores them one by one: Shorter work weeks. More time for childcare and elder care. More leisure time. A potential resurgence of the arts.

In the tech industry, we should reconsider our habitual, careless hubris of thinking that we’re somehow ushering in the golden age of eco-consciousness because we’re enabling the knowledge economy. Our business practices tell a completely different story, and it’s our duty — every knowledge worker’s, every consultant’s, every software developer’s — to right this wrong.

He described speaking to children in Toronto who could not explain where water or food came from, only that it was supplied by the economy.

Our deep disconnection from the environment, and increasingly our inability to establish even theoretical connections between the soil, plants and animals in our food chain and ourselves, is maddening and sad. Especially urban children, in the developed and developing world, have no idea where food comes from.

Increasingly – as Michael Pollan elegantly argues – food also isn’t food anymore. Most items we buy from supermarkets are industrially assembled from component ingredients (most of which are based on corn), containing chemical compounds that we wouldn’t recognize as ‘food’ if we were to examine them individually.

So it’s understandable that children don’t understand where food comes from. Adults don’t either. We are deeply confused and uncertain about the world we live in:

Suzuki also underlined the interconnectedness of humans with their natural world – a point not often made by mainstream environment critics. “We are the environment. There is no distinction. What we do to the earth we do to ourselves,” he said.