How ‘Natural Growth’ can save the world.

Without thinking we use natural growth for many common tasks already, simply by starting things to finishing them with a minimum of waste. In each case you “save the world” from needless excess consumptive growth in getting things started, wasting your efforts and the earth’s other natural and human resources.

Every kind of life, and kind of effort too, begins with building up a system of demands for available resources,
to further expand on what built up before.

That expansion by building on what was built is the universal start-up process of nature, also sometimes called “extractive growth.” You see it very clearly in every kind of start-up, of a new friendship, a business, a career, a seedling or a life from a fertilized egg. The all start with steps that build up from what was built before. The build up that making breakfast starts with, for example, begins with the idea of food that makes you hungry, that then gets you to reach into the cupboard, and refrigerator for supplies, and the drawer or shelf for utensils, building a customized system and supplies for making your meal.

Nature’s integral; chaining start-up growth & refinement growth in preparing for a good life.

That process could go wrong, the way mankind’s way of using technology to multiply our making of things on earth exploded, and we now don’t seem to know how to stop. In making breakfast it might similarly go wrong if you got carried away taking out provisions. You might start with a small idea of what you need from the fridge, and add to that bigger ideas as you explore what there is to take out, repeating it to exhaustion perhaps, till the fridge and cupboards, pantry, and cellar, are emptied and all the family’s provisions in reach are mounded on the kitchen and dining-area floor, as you get hungrier and hungrier and your eyes expand way beyond the limit of your stomach, putting nearly all the family’s provisions to waste. The particular outcome is rare, but it is very true that once you get going with growing a process of growing, the process itself can become addictive. Today we clearly see in how we are wasting the earth in somewhat the same way, and love to be moved to tears and laughter by watching Disney’s Fantasia when Mickey Mouse learns turn his chores over to his broom with a magic spell, which gets tragically carried away carrying water.

starting things to finish them with a minimum of waste

Of course, we don’t usually behave that way at all, but at some point near the beginning of taking out provisions to use, switch to thinking about how to get to end of having a satisfying meal. We almost never have the exact end in mind either, but perhaps initially take out eggs and cheese to perhaps put them back and take out bread for toast and milk for cereal if you’re in a hurry. As you put things together you also do various smaller and smaller things you discover to do, to perfect the end result while also arranging the timing to get all the parts to come together at once, with excess provisions put away, all part of getting ready to sit down, perhaps with together with others in the family.

In doing that, rather than letting the initial provisioning of breakfast get carried away, we have “USED NATURAL GROWTH TO SAVE THE WORLD,” most often without really realizing what an enormous contribution to the community and your family was done by simply not maximizing the waste of all available provisions in the process of making breakfast. Of course, it’s also important to do and to watch for in other circumstances, a natural duty for living in a commons.

It seems like a little thing but is actually a very big thing,
that we casually do for ourselves and others
many times every day

that we casually do for ourselves and others many times every day

People are plenty smart enough to see that this “RULE OF NATURAL GROWTH” (also called “nature’s integral“), to finish up what you’ve started up doing before you make a mess for yourself and others, should also apply to civilization as a whole, and at every scale in-between. People do see that ALL development creates disaster risks, for example, and that boundless development would always creates an all-consuming disaster. Our minds still “get in the way” somehow, transfixed by fantasies it seems, and we just trundle along on the clear path to that all consuming disaster not knowing what else to do.

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How this would save the world is really something quite plausible. We already see in progress a great “change of heart” by businesses and investors around the world to join in on averting the clearly disastrous future now directly ahead of us. If that initiates a wave of common sense, with business and investors choosing to follow the wave of the “impact investing” community, averting the looming crises in the most direct way possible, and with much less government involvement. Following that wave of necessity to avert disaster would also turn our world onto the natural growth path for perfecting how we use the earth. You could ask yourself and others to join the wave! The choices of higher purposes include the Green Climate Fund, supporting various SDG goals. The real, macro-economic effect is to distribute wealth in the service of higher purposes while directing profits away from concentrating wealth and raising the economy’s ever growing demands on nature and humanity.

Various other journal entries here discuss more about “what to do”, there’s a whole category with dozens of good little articles and discussions of it. Still, the best way to learn about it is for yourself, from watching how all of life revolves around the variations in nature’s integral, seeing for yourself how ‘start-up’ processes yield to ‘end-up’ processes in taking things to the natural climax of releasing them for their useful life.

SDG8 side event: Recoupling

2019 UN HLPF side event scheduled Tuesday July 10 2019 1:15 to 2:45 at the UN Millennium Hilton, 3min statement. Further links to natural growth strategy below. – Jessie Henshaw

Thank you for coming.  
Find more of my statement and links at www.synapse9.com/signals

My name is Jessie Henshaw.  I’m a natural systems scientist who developed a fascination with how living systems transform as they develop, such as how our economy once changed by small accumulating steps that got bigger and bigger.  Those ever-increasing rates and kinds of change are the key reason there are natural limits to growth.  Growth is itself an organizational process that pushes economies and their organizations in the direction of increasingly disruptive limits.  

For example, walking down the street by bigger and bigger steps, making more and more progress at first and would lead to losing control, and a painful fall.   Similarly, in the last 250 years, the world economy doubled its annual expansion about 12 times, so our annual expansions today are about the size of the entire world economy of 1920, truly enormous.  

In part, we experience that as universal pressure, for increased economic performance from all people, all organizations, all societies, and of course, all of nature too.  We are also feel surrounded by systems failing to keep up, and in crisis, crying for help, that we find hard to deliver.  So today the true location of the most “vulnerable people” and most “vulnerable regions,” struggling with unmanageable demands, is now truly the whole earth. (to cut for time)

At first, the economy’s growing demands were not overwhelming, and seemed very rewarding for large sectors, having a negligible impact on the earth as a whole too.  Continually multiplying them changed all that.  Now they disrupt every environment and are breaking through all silos of discussion.  Now we see there was no “economic decoupling,” but just detachment from our responsibility.  Now we look around and see an enormous diversity of crises that were not supposed to materialize, and need to decide what to do.  

We need an “economic recoupling” with our responsibilities for the earth and humankind.   An easy first step is to think of your responsibility for steering the economy as equal to your share of the economy.  It may seem small, but in a global economy where it takes the whole world to deliver every product or service, we are similarly responsible for a share of every harm caused too.  

Nature’s integral: joining the multiplication of parts (red) with the refinement of their designs and uses (blue) to prepare for LIFE (green) as the reward in the end

The path ahead I see, for transforming the economy is to change from compound growth to natural growth,  climaxing growth at a peak of resilience and vitality, ready for a secure, enduring and creative life on earth.

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The Economic Path to Natural Growth

PDF slides: https://synapse9.com/_SDinteg/PathToNatGrowth.pdf
2019 Jul 2 Talk 30 min: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5Cz7vc0-c4