Upcoming city election should focus on sustainability

More than 35 years ago, far-seeing people in Albuquerque were trying to think through an idea that amounted to an economic heresy. It was called steady state economics, based on the primary insight that societies will fall apart and people will suffer terribly if their economies outgrow or destroy their natural resources.

As the mayoral election of 2009 approaches in the midst of the gravest economic crisis of last 75 years, I’m wondering if we’ll hear candidates parrot the old line about “inevitable” material growth, or if they’ll really start to explore steady state sustainability.

Steady state economics emphasizes qualitative growth over quantitative growth. A steady state economy grows quality of life, not population, not geographic size, not material consumption. It is based, to some extent, on a mature concept of a satisfying “enough” replacing a dangerous too much.

Qualitative growth, of course, is subjective. But it is also quantifiable. It stresses wages over profits, rewarded effort over exploited labor, local business over international trade run by rootless enterprises. It has its focus on the arts, education, a high quality of public life, local entrepreneurism, on food, on discourse, parks, libraries and on resource conservation.

It’s not surprising that steady state economic theories are are moving back into American consciousness during these dire times.

Adbusters magazine’s current issue — “The Big Ideas of 2009″ — has awarded the great spokesman of steady state economics, Herman Daly, the Man of the Year award for 2008. Since the 1970s, Daly has been attacking orthodox economics for its “critical flaw,” failing “to take into account how economic processes consume resources and generate wastes.” Daly sees orthodox economic activity, Adbusters wrote, as a “growing sub-set, of a non-growing planet.”

Daly wrote that “current economic growth has uncoupled itself from the world and has become irrelevant. Worse, it has become a blind guide.”

Daly’s book “Steady State Economics,” was first published in l977. It had a powerful influence on the environmental movement of the time. But was always considered a “fringe” idea by those ran the show.

But Daly is not crank. He’s a professor at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy, a former senior economist at the World Bank, working on environmental economics, and the winner of numerous international awards, including the Honorary Right Livelihood Award, which has been described as an “alternative Nobel Prize.”

A discussion of steady state economics sounds like just the topic Albuquerque’s 2009 mayoral race needs if it hopes to become serious about the troubled world we’re living in.

I don’t mean, though, an idealized about face in our local approach to livelihood. I do mean, however, a discussion on how we can infuse our local economic thinking with steady state ideas, incentives, and solutions to problems.

I’m wondering if we’ll hear any new ideas this year from any candidate? Will candidates directly address the current, and sure to be long-lived, recession? Or will they talk about the present as if it were the past, urging growth, growth and more growth, offering TIDDS to every developer, vowing to create lustrous new urbanist settlements in the wild open spaces miles and miles from town? Or will some candidate catch our imagination, and step up to address the crisis that this city, along with every other city in America, is in?

What would stepping up mean? Might it mean being brave enough to discuss economics as if reality mattered? Might it mean proposing a moratorium on sprawl development, realistic water rationing, incentives for infill development, empowering neighborhoods to protect themselves from predatory builders, public investment in more and more mass transit, resurrecting the regional stock exchanges of the 1930s to support local business and agriculture, actually cleaning up Cold War water pollution from Kirtland and Sandia Labs, working arrangements with local banks to finance recycling operations with the city as a guaranteed customer, creating a local senior teaching core to stimulate younger students to think productively about the future.

Would stepping up mean, perhaps, actually giving serious consideration to embracing at least some ideas from the concept of a steady state economy in Albuquerque, allowing us to grow qualitatively, if not quantitatively, as this world-changing economic and environmental crisis unfolds?

Qualitative growth is not negative; it’s not a failure caused by material hardship. It is another way to make a living while making a life that better fits the environmental and economic realities of our times.

I can think of nothing I’d like better than to see candidates talk meaningfully about the economic analyses of Herman Daly.

Adbusters describes Daly’s views: Humanity, he argued, “had to shift to a steady-state economy, one in which demands placed on the ecosystem would remain safely in bounds. This would imply shifting economic policy from a focus on stoking growth, where the scale of physical demands on ecosystems perpetually increased, to a focus on development, meaning humanity would have to learn to make wiser use of a modest and more stable level of material taken from the environment.”

By contrasting “development” with “growth,” Daly means, I think, emphasizing quality of life, a developmental approach to living, rather than physical and material quantitative growth.

Adbusters believes that “Thanks to the overwhelming evidence natural scientists have amassed demonstrating that if we want to avoid catastrophic climate change, humanity must stop pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, mainstream economists are grudgingly coming to accept the fact that there are ecological limits to our growth afer all.”

On a macro scale, Daly feels bailouts of failing industries are “merely a way to keep the growth economy from failing a little longer while allowing it to continue degrading the planet…. Instead, we need to redesign our laws and institutions to foster an economy that remains within biophysical limits… Of course the growth economists will howl that such measures would slow the growth of the GDP. I say so be it –- growth has become uneconomic, and we have limited time to bring the economy into line with the biosphere’s carrying capacity.”

Daly considers the earth as a whole to be in something like a steady state, not static, but with the inflow of radiant energy from the sun equal to the outflow of energy, until the trapping of greenhouse gases. “The closer the economy approaches the scale of the whole Earth, the more it will have to conform to the physical behavior mode of the Earth,” Daly writes in Adbusters. “That behavior mode is a steady state -– a system that permits qualitative development but not aggregate quantitative growth.”

One practical way of bring that about, Daly says, is to tax “what we want less of [depletion and pollution] and ceasing to tax what we want more of (income…) -– as the bumper sticker puts it ‘tax bads, not goods.’”

It would be a major political stunner to hear a viable candidate for the mayor’s job in Albuquerque proposing to heavily tax what we don’t want -– sprawl development, excessive water use and air and water pollution for starters -– and ceasing to tax, and even giving incentives to, what we want -– water conservation, infill development, local agriculture for starters.

That would be a candidate I could support.