Our Illogical Conception of Growth in Modern Times
Text Alex Dieker
Image Berit Anna Rojer
Sometimes, when I’m particularly bored at home, I’ll look outside my window to the street below. I live on a quiet street in the Bijlmer, quiet enough that, most of the time, only one or two people are in view. It could be a middle-aged man, or an elderly woman carrying her shopping bags. It could be a family excitedly jumping out of a car returning home
from a weekend trip. Frequently, I see not a living soul for minutes on end and am reminded of where I am. Below me lies building material, placed on top of the block’s foundation, on top of swampland. This is not a place that makes life easy for us humans. The sheer amount of infrastructural work completed by the Dutch to make their country livable is astounding to me, especially as someone whose home city has endured years of over-budget construction shenanigans. Without it, these streets would be quieter, our cars and bikes
replaced with aquatic lifeforms.
With the onset of a worldwide climate disaster in recent centuries, emphasis has become placed on how we might reverse the effects of rampant capitalist development and
disregard for what economists term ‘externalities,’ things ranging from flooding and drought to sex-gender system inequality and warfare. These are crucial aspects of human life, but our economic system is like a weightlifter who keeps needling himself with steroids while failing to eat healthy, sleep well, and live a well-balanced, happy lifestyle. We believe in development for development’s sake without accounting for what this growth has done to the Earth, or whether unlimited growth is even something desirable or possible in the long-term. It’s as if we live in a hyper-realistic simulation of the Cities Skylines videogame, whereby the demand for constant growth of commercial, residential, and industrial properties is facilitated by some unknown code embedded behind the scenes.
Our ‘growth and damn-the-consequences’ mentality comes from a peculiarly anti-scientific economic logic which has consumed business, academia, and legacy media. More philosophically, however, is the distinction we’ve managed to make between man and nature. In The Nutmeg’s Curse, Amitav Ghosh explores this distinction in relation to the creation of what became the United States. Building on the logic employed by the Dutch to subjugate the Bandanese for their nutmeg, the settlers in America quickly terraformed the land of New England to make their settler colony. Terraforming evokes the idea of a Minecraft building project, but for the settlers it was not just about adapting the land for their usage. It involved renaming places, using a genocidal form of warfare against people and their animals, and generally reshaping the natural systems of the new continent to make everything suitable for European life and trade.
When I was home for Christmas break, I was reading the history of the small New Hampshire town in which my parents live. I was immediately struck by one passage during the period of the French and Indian War in the late-seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The local Indian groups participated in a fur trade with the settlers and generally lived in peace with the white-skinned Europeans, but the latter still concocted a plan to take all of them prisoner:
Inviting them to a sham battle, the militia surrounded them after the Indians had fired blank charges [provided by the settlers] and disarmed them. The friendly Pennacooks were set free, and the remaining two hundred southern tribesmen were sent to Massachusetts as prisoners. Six were hanged for past offenses, and some of the others were sold into slavery. This was the end of friendly relations between the English and the local Indians. [Newington, New Hampshire: A Heritage of Independence Since 1630]
The end of friendly relations, indeed – in a relationship always bound for disaster. If you force yourself to create the mental image of man separate from nature, while simultaneously associating groups like Amerindians to that very same nature, it is but a small leap from exploiting the ‘natural resources’ around you to taking captive and expelling those people who get in the way of that exploitation. They might as well be just another natural resource, not fit for human consumption, but certainly good enough to trade in slavery.
In Boston, all of the hullabaloo regarding infrastructure in my lifetime has been about the ‘Big Dig,’ a lengthy, expensive construction project that spanned nearly four decades from its ideation to completion. The project rerouted a major interstate artery which cuts through the centre of the city and one almost got the sense that, upon completion, the Big Dig would permanently improve public infrastructure and transportation in New England’s largest city.
Yet, as Harvey and Knox straight-forwardly explain in their ethnographical exploration of Peruvian infrastructure, Roads, the ribbon-cutting ceremony is only the beginning of work.
Constant maintenance and rethinking are required to keep construction projects up to scratch. This is not the nuanced thinking that got us to where we are, and it shows: even more recently, a renovation worth tens of billions of dollars to a line on the T, Boston’s metro system, was found to contain faulty measurements, which required an almost complete overhaul.
Growth, and damn the consequences!
Failure to provide basic safety measures, and logical thinking?
These are all externalities.
The overcoming of Amsterdam’s watery underbelly provides a stark contrast to things like the T renovation or Big Dig in its sheer existential necessity: if the dikes don’t hold, if
the street foundation begins to crumble, we are left with the swash of the North Sea. But all of this rests on the logic that if something can be done to maintain the system as-is, and it makes a tidy profit, it shall be done. Jan Peterzoon-Coen’s men pillaged and killed the Bandanese to shore up Dutch control over the spice trade, providing the monetary basis for the very kind of infrastructure from which we now benefit. It seems to me that we never stopped to ask the important questions: Is it sustainable to live with these never-ending construction projects? What is going to happen when our socioeconomic system can no longer sustain this rapid growth?
Most importantly, when we’re all underwater, what will we make of this so-called success in development?
Comentários