Sustainability Redefined: Setting a Goal of a Flourishing World

Don't ask a child or a tree or a company to stop growing because it will consume more. Don't debate whether it should grow or not. Work on the conditions for feeding it and encourage it to grow to its natural productive limits.

The problem of growth is not ideological, it's a problem of human nature and physical planetary limits. We need to grow, otherwise we wouldn't be so growth-obsessed. If our species was naturally given to eating nuts and berries in the sun all day that's what we'd be doing, rather than developing, innovating, exploring, connecting and pushing boundaries. The current political and economic systems are products of human endeavour and aspiration, and therefore are products of Earth's ecosystems. Let's accept ourselves as we are, and work with reality.  It's frustrating to see champions of growth or non-growth sparring with each other, because it tends to keep the discourse on the wrong level. If humans intrinsically need 'growth', let's concentrate on growing intelligently, and consciously, rather than on debating whether we should stop growing. For sustainability this means at least three things: 
1. Learning to measure and define 'growth' in a helpful and constructive way that encourages intelligence and consciousness of impacts (Meadows, Sen, Fitoussi, Stiglitz, Rockström, Raworth and many others);
2. Getting very good at the technical and industrial systems that will enable us to decouple economic development from limit-ignoring consequences (Braungart, McDonough, Anderson, and many others);
3. Dropping backward economic and accounting policies and developing the incentives and fiscal frameworks that encourage 1. and 2. above. (Hardly any government at all, excepting Bhutan and, timidly and half-heartedly, China.)

[For how to innovate business models and define growth targets that respect contextual limits, contact the Sustainability Context Group or New Angles  (www.sustainableorganisations.org or www.newangles.eu).]

Good to point out the failure of incrementalism - less bad is not good enough. This means that relevant change means systemic change. The systems that today cause the problems must in future, if we want to have a future, be rejigged to solve them. 

The key system to rejig is of course economics. The key conversation is about strategies of growth. Here it goes wrong. The default strategy needs no intervention; growth will continue in destruct-mode until unsustainability reaches its messy finalé. The proposed eco-strategy is to abandon growth in favour of more meaningful measures. This proposal is not new; it echoes loudly through the green movement for at least 4 decades. It also drowns out the opportunity of systemic change.

The antigrowth proposal has not and cannot be accepted by politicians for a reason that you won't hear from politicians. They like this terrible measure of progress because it's a terrible measure of progress. Whether they make smart or incredibly stupid decisions growth tends to go up anyhow. It's a suit of armour against their own inability to actually solve anything. Give it up? No thanks, they say.

The tragedy of the greens is a fundamentalist unwillingness to look beyond the moral high ground of antigrowth. From this untrodden ground we can see the default strategy to be self-defeating. Why seek growth in ways that undermine everything needed for growth? We can see that the vast activity needed to become a restorative flourishing civilisation is an easy growth bonanza. We can even see the potential for building this goal into markets, http://blindspot.org.uk/third-policy-switch/