Slow Throughput
This sent me down a rabbit hole, rediscovering these glorious, forgotten heretics of economics. 📚 Daly 🌍, bless his heart, pointing out the World Bank's 'development' was basically ecological arson
So, you know, we're all swimming in this soup of 'circular economy' talk, right? 🔄 Butterflies 🦋 fluttering, resources looping, all very tidy. But, as usual, they've left out the most glaringly obvious thing: the economy. 💰 Like, where is it? Are we just shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic, pretending a bit more recycling will save us from the iceberg of infinite growth? 🚢 It's a classic case of forgetting the social, the messy, the human element.
This sent me down a rabbit hole, rediscovering these glorious, forgotten heretics of economics. 📚 Daly 🌍, bless his heart, pointing out the World Bank's 'development' was basically ecological arson. 🔥 Then there's Boulding 💡, that radical, saying 'consumption' is a myth, a collective delusion. 🛍️ And Soddy 💸, explaining money as this weird, socially constructed anti-entropy device. ⏳ It's all about control, about pretending we can cheat the universe. 🤝
And it's this whole 'wasteland' thing, right? 🏞️ This idea that land not exploited is wasted? What a perfect example of how our imaginations have been colonized. 🏭 It's not land that's wasted, it's our capacity for wonder, for seeing the world as something other than a resource to be extracted. 🌿 We’re stuck in this frantic 'throughput' dance 🚚💨, mistaking speed for progress, quantity for quality. 🧠💪
We’re all about “end of pipe” solutions 💧, like we can just flush the problems away and forget about them. 🗑️➡️🌊 It’s the ultimate act of denial. We’re treating nature’s gifts like an endless buffet 🧾, not a finite inheritance. 💸🌿 And we’ve forgotten the wisdom of the elders 🦉, the deep time understanding of balance, the autopoiesis of the living world, the slow, intricate dance of creation. ⏳⚖️
So, what are we going to do? ⚡ Are we going to keep playing pretend? Or are we going to reclaim our imaginations, our autonomy? 💪 We need to redefine 'growth' as something meaningful, something human, something just. ✨ We need to remember that we’re not just consumers, we’re creators, we’re storytellers. And we have the power to tell a different story. 🎙️
Very true. But we’re also caught in the machine, so it helps to have someone on your community building team who can run the detailed numbers and show, for instance, exactly how our municipal tax money is being spent, especially in a semi-rural area like the one I live in. We’re all in economic uncertaintly, and homelessness is on a fast upward curve. Money continues to be funnelled upward, but we barely notice it anymore. High cost infrastructure investments are being imposed on us, as if unlimited growth was still the dominant myth. But a major recession is on the way, and the tendency is for those who’ve been feathering their own nests for a while to grab more than what’s good for the ordinary taxpayer. Images of the collapse of the Soviet Union are very present in my mind.