Why Growth Is Bad, Gardens Good and Cuba Key to Oil-Free Future

Bill McKibben makes it clear what he abhors: Wal-Mart (the scourge of small retailers) and Archer Daniels Midland (the bane of family farms).

Instead of a growth-oriented economy, he writes in “Deep Economy,” we need one that meets deep human needs, such as the sense of community that he says has been vanishing from the U.S. along with all those businesses and farms.
“Deep Economy” is a critique on the order of the late John Kenneth Galbraith’s “The Affluent Society.” Galbraith questioned “conventional wisdom” about economics, noting that riches hadn’t erased poverty or inequality.

Almost 50 years later, that’s still true. But as McKibben sees it, the biggest problem now is that growth not only fails to make the affluent feel any better about their lives but also (and more direly) destroys communities and threatens the Earth.

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A good deal of angst underpins the book. McKibben is worried not only that the world is running out of oil (and maybe water), making much of the economy as currently structured unsustainable, but also that using up all that oil (and other fossil fuels) is going to have nasty effects.

“We might as well have a contest to pick a new name for Earth, because it will be a different planet,” he writes in a discussion of global warming. “Humans have never done anything bigger, not even the invention of nuclear weapons.”

Bloomberg