Joe Clarkson
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I have always been enamored of “a woman admired or idealized for her courage, outstanding achievements, or noble qualities”. I just can’t get enough of them, so I must be a “heroine junky”.
But what good will Germany’s thrift be when the day comes for all those debtor countries to abrogate their debts? Especially since it will be a lot of German lenders who will see their assets vaporize.
Countries are not at all like families. When a family goes bankrupt it loses almost everything. When a country goes bankrupt it gets to keep all the goodies it bought with the borrowed money, especially if those goodies included infrastructure like ports, roads and irrigation projects.
True, when a country defaults, its economy may collapse into austerity, but I can’t see why it’s so much better to suffer years of austerity, like Greece, just to avoid default.
I can sympathize with your befuddlement. My orientation has generally been toward the energy component of the limits you describe. I remember driving down I-5 toward Seattle in the 70’s, looking at all the cars, each of which had an engine that 100 years earlier would have been able to power a small industrial facility, and thinking that this profligacy had to end in tears.
For me, the limits to growth have always been obvious. One big question, as you so clearly point out, is why so many fail to see the obvious? But a bigger question for me was, “What do I do about it?”
My wife and I are products of the post WW2 U.S. culture, so even though we made earnest attempts to conform our lives to the obvious, we were not psychologically able to go all the way to truly sustainable living circumstances. We lived in the country, grew and hunted food, and generally tried to become self-sufficient. I made a career in renewable energy research and development. We have powered our off-grid homes with solar and wood.
But despite this modicum of good, we were also hypocrites. We had two children, owned cars, worked for money, flew in airplanes. I always feel a sense of shame for that hypocrisy . We still live in the country and are still trying to become as self-sufficient as possible in anticipation of what must inevitably come, but we will always need to atone for our carbon-burning sins. Time to get away from this computer, wash the breakfast dishes and plant some more trees.
“If anyone can tell me why, I’m open to suggestions.”
Because we are living beings. Growth is part of the definition of being alive. In spite of our brains, we cannot escape the imperatives to aggrandize and dissipate energy, imperatives that are common to all living things. The only controls on growth are those that come from environmental factors that limit resources to any given population. Every living entity grabs more and more goodies until Nature slaps their ‘hands’ and says, “Enough!”.
