The Perils of Unplanned Perpetual Growth

Norm Wicks is a long-time Whatcom County resident.

All segments of Whatcom County citizenry should be indebted to Whatcom Watch for its on-going receptivity to community input on the subject of growth. Given the publication’s manifest commitment to environmental protection and ecological sensitivity, it’s natural that such a mission enjoys broad support in the face of the obvious impact of growth on us all. It represents corrective democracy in action. This is where Whatcom Watch has an opportunity to play a role. While rejecting the nihilism of “grow or die,” it can further deep-en its posture and image beyond that of competent reporting of local “findings,” monitoring results and reforming subsystems, to that of system-wide analysis of our socioeconomic dynamics and how they affect our very culture, ideals, quality of life and environment.

As a long-time county resident, I have personally undergone an increasing awareness of the serious implications of what I call the “perpetual growth” mantra being ever-increasingly employed and orches-trated in the mass media by representatives of Wall Street and mo-nopoly elements of corporate production. In the December 1995 issue of Whatcom Watch I addressed the phenomenon again in a commentary on mayoral candidate Del Lowrey’s letter of June 1995, wherein he challenged the “Three Myths of Growth” exposition of a Mr. Fodor in the previous April issue.

In any event, I attempted to introduce the perspective of the very nature of our economic system in its present stage of historical development as being the genesis of the growth mandate. Citing instances of national expansionist, exploitive foreign and domestic policies and their class aspects, I drew upon a local example for comparison: the creation of Sudden Valley in the Lake Whatcom watershed, with all its collateral growth interests and negative ramifications which have been studied and anguished about ever since.

Today, the “establishment” obsession with the “market” and the lexicon of growth, to the exclusion of the interests of the working class (prime generators of all wealth) and the average consumer, is apparently being driven by a new anxiety. That is the notion that perhaps the socialist alternatives blooming in the 20th century may not stay buried indefinitely, particularly under the fertile climate of insights provided by American writers such as Vance Packard, C. Wright Mills, Michael Parenti, Kevin Phillips and Robert Dreyfuss. The frantic dictum “grow or die” seems antithetical to the ideal of “sustainable economy” in the dialectic of contemporary ideology.

Precious resources are fast dwindling and degrading. There appears to be no U.S. government recognition of the delimit-ing laws of nature, which have inexorably brought down previous empires; the extravagance and failings of each rendering it no more exceptional than those before it. The ruthlessness and blind misjudgment of current U.S. global expansionism and horrendous dip-lomacy aside, the administration’s withdrawal of fund-ing for international family planning agencies abroad, and refusal to adhere to the Kyoto accords on world carbon dioxide emission con-trol, demonstrate how little we can rely on critical assistance or leadership from Washington, D.C.

It is against this backdrop that one aspect, now more than ever, threatens the very viability of human civilization in this new century: population pressure. Despite AIDS, interminable military conflict, and deteriorating living conditions for all classes, population pressure (in combination with the cold calculus and internal logic of single nation dominance—steered by forces seeking maximum exploitive profit through global hegemony) poses a burden on people and institutions of goodwill that can no longer be ignored or tolerated.

At its core, the growth totem is an icon, which serves as a Wizard of Oz-like euphemistic screen for private capital accumulation and an admission of impending systemic failure. The biblical injunction to go forth and be fruitful (multiply) needs to be treated with as much reconsideration as “an eye for an eye” etc. Unlimited population growth, along with a quasi-covert corporate -government policy of illegal immigration, may lower corporate labor costs, but it simultaneously fouls the planetary nest for all living things in respect to clean air and water needed to survive and thrive.

In the final scheme of things, it will no longer be considered tenable to arrest this retrogressive process through piecemeal, symptom-oriented gradualism or accommodation. Interminable calls to planning departments or proposals for new reg-ulations are no longer enough. To butcher a well-worn metaphor, it’s like rearranging the rulebooks on the decks of the foundering polit-ical subdivisions. It’s conventional wisdom that enough money or influence will buy almost anything, from the Securities and Exchange Commission and branches of national government on down to the smallest towns’ city halls.

Change cannot be thought best implemented top-down or through masked riders breezing into town on a white horse. The all too familiar scenes of new county transplants from large, congested metro-politan areas warning the locals that such dire chaos will overwhelm them, too, usually include exhortations to mitigate or re-regulate in order to dissuade the barbarians of growth at the gate. Often the “gate” turns out to be the county, city, neighborhood or development boundary that constitutes their chosen residential and/or recreational niche. Ultimately, all this simply means is people being shunted else-where; whether it be a mile away to a slum area or to valuable food production zones.

Similarly, the instinct for wealth-protected isolationism is at the expense of the lower classes. The relatively shrinking middle class can no longer count on the prospect of long-term smugness or splendid insulation from interrelated con-sequences, intended or otherwise. Instead, we need to shed the illusion that identity and legitimacy is to be sought principally through relentless, autonomous competition with all others rather than through liberating cooperation towards true conservatism. We would garner additional benefit in moderating latent hubris by drawing more productively from the insights of the “deep ecology” movement.

Can Whatcom Watch slay this systemic growth problem alone? Of course not. But it would be within the spirit of its impressive legacy and earned credentials to provide leadership in partnership with a diverse, supportive and progressive community with a tradition of activism and follow through. I, for one, will be sincerely anticipating such renewed relevance in the evolutionary years to come. §