Beyond Growth: Journey to Gaia 1

All growth leads to overshoot and the collapse of civilisations.  Any species overgrowing all others eventually suffers termination-level resource deficits both from the ecosystem (prey, raw materials) and the physical environment (habitable space, water, etc).  Humans crossed their survivability threshold thousands of years ago and have been sustained by completely artificial means ever since: intensive agriculture, farming, mining, drilling.  Unfulfilled with what the ecosystem was already providing us, we developed our own food production while scaling up all extractive operations: a model which worked wonders for about a dozen millennia, until it became obvious that we were running out of Earth.

Despite taking control of its food supply, this civilisation never took control of its population. Through farming and mining humans thought they would free themselves completely from the controlled, inadequate ration-size portions provided by the ecosystem.  But there is only so much you can steal when the shop has been raided over and over, and the customers are multiplying.  We didn’t just max out our credit card.  We made the Bank of Earth collapse.  There’s only crumbs and greasy napkins left on this free buffet. 

Those in denial of our population problem have a serious math handicap they need to attend to. They advocate taxing the rich, as if this was a money problem.  While money can be printed in infinite amounts, resources will always be finite, however fairly or unfairly you decide to distribute or re-distribute them.  Inequality is completely irrelevant when the resource pie is not enough for 8 billion humans, and overshoot continues to shrink the size of the pie.

This civilisation needs to urgently contract.  There is so much discourse on how our civilisation can transition to degrowth, which is a euphemism for contraction, yet the subject matter is immensely challenging intellectually, given that growth is deeply nested in our culture and psyche.  Humans are designed by evolution to grow and overexploit, and this is why they became the parasites they are.  Given our growth mindset, rather than trusting Nobel Prize-festooned economists with designing a steady-state economy, why not try and emulate one that already exists, right here on Earth?

While it is already too late for humans to re-integrate themselves back into the ecosystem, it is theoretically possible to design a human steady-state economy that lives side-by-side with Earth’s economy, rather than as an internal parasite.  Let’s take a trip, far away, on a planet called Gaia 1, where a humanoid species is taking a stab at this, rather than stabbing each other.  Perhaps this psychedelic metaphor will help you imagine a different world.  Humans love stories.

Gaia 1 inhabitants have been keenly observing nature to understand how it manages growth.  Trees and other species grow, but none of them ever become parasitic.  They are limited both by the availability of resources and competition for those resources with other species.  The cap on resource consumption is extremely tight, and brutal.  But it works, and miraculously, no species go extinct.  Gaians have therefore implemented artificial caps throughout their economy, as they realise that they have an unfair advantage to other species.  They have placed caps on energy consumption by individuals, and resource use by businesses.   They have even placed a cap on childbearing.  There are caps and thresholds literally everywhere: it is a bureaucratic, logistical and political nightmare, but it is the only way to do this given that Gaians, like humans, are no longer regulated by the ecosystem.  They have to regulate themselves.

But what about all the positive aspects of growth?  Growth may be harmful, but it fosters competition between businesses and therefore innovation.  How does a civilisation evolve without its major drivers of profit and expansion?  Gaians have solved this issue by uncoupling innovation from growth.  They motivate their businesses to innovate not by how much money they can make, but through the provision of legal, intellectual and financial support for innovation.  In return, businesses need to share their innovations with the world.  There are no tech giants that replace governments on Gaia 1.  No company is ever allowed to get too big and powerful.  There are no countries either.  The existence of countries leads to competition, and therefore growth.  Gaia 1 is a global federation of nations.

On Gaia 1 there isn’t any money, in the human sense of the word.  Gaians realised that money and free market economies are a recipe for greed, growth and disaster.  By providing a universal basic income to all, people feel safe, and happy enough that they don’t need to dream big of becoming oligarchs and crypto queens.  They value their personal development much more than money, and they do the things they like, not a job they hate.  Who needs money when you’re happy, and safe? 

Before you say that all of this is too utopian, that Gaia 1 could never happen on Earth, ask yourself: do we have another choice?  If we accept corruption, greed and conflict as unavoidable, we need to also be prepared to accept the collapse of civilisation and probable extinction of humanity as unavoidable.

George is an author, researcher, molecular biologist and food scientist.

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