Helena Norberg-Hodge,
A new friend mentioned your writings, and I find you are asking a lot of questions I think I can help answer. I’m a scientist who is slowly learning how to explain to people what I found.
Understanding how nature changed the world to make growth profoundly unprofitable is something I view from a physical science approach, leading to a better understanding of how natural systems work as wholes. They go through phases of development, where the meanings of things change.
I do diagnostic complex systems science to watch how it happens. It points to how the real solution to growth is understanding our stage of growth, now needing to mature toward stability to avoid accelerating our conflicts and scarcities.
I am concerned that the attempt to restart the global growth process that just so badly failed is likely to result in a further rapid decline. The problem is called “diminishing returns”, and it’s nature’s signal that we crossed a line and that investment means the opposite of what it once did. Using investment to pump up the economies again will not have the effect it did in the 1930’s.
We’ve now used those untapped resources and built those airports and suburbs, and ate the fish. All of those ‘accomplishments’ are now burdens on us, not benefits, and every direction we look in we run into shortages and complications. Our time of limitless horizons is now in our past, and the present physical circumstance is one of maturing relationships.
Diminishing returns means that continued increasing investment will lead to increased costs and complications, returning increased long term liabilities and not profit.
I’ve written a good bit about the whole subject, and the one way out that nature seems to provide, but it’s as radical as we need and hard for people to fathom. J.M. Keynes noticed the way out too, thought he didn’t press the point at the time because we were not in this situation then.
If you’re looking a real way for us to stop accelerating our exploitation of the planet and further foreclosing our futures, I have it. Have a look around my site. My publications are at www.synapse9.com/phpub.htm
Thanks for all your work!
All the best,