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

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