On July 4th, we celebrate the day our founding fathers declared independence from a tyrant. We gather around the barbecue, kick the soccer ball, tell stories with family and friends, and watch the skies alight with fireworks. For a moment, Americans enjoy a brief respite from worrying about work, climate change, homelessness, impending war with Iran, or that Texas-sized vortex of plastic in the Pacific.
But those worries will come inconveniently crashing back. Maybe it’s news of another fire roaring through a Californian town, devastating lives and homes. Or a hurricane tearing up the East Coast, unleashing deluges of rain and flooding. Or more drought-desiccated cities, towns and farmland across the continent.
Other worries inevitably squirm back into being. Will the latest headlines say anything except that housing prices are climbing steadily higher? Will reasonable thinking prevail and tensions with Iran de-escalate? Will plastic start disintegrating faster? And what can we do?
Most of the answers won’t surprise.
Climate chaos continues to make weather more unpredictable. Housing is increasingly unaffordable in cities, forcing us to work longer hours to get by or face living on the streets. Iran shutting the Strait of Hormuz would threaten our thirsty lapping at the tap of oil, and the prospect of war plays well in presidential elections. By the way, I actually can spot a soccer ball floating in that Pacific plastic patch.
But, yes! – finally, some good tidings around the barbecue – we can do something. Let’s recognize that, like our founding fathers, we are ruled by another tyrant. Hidden behind our worries, and demanding our complete obedience, is the tyranny of economic growth.
But wait. You’ve been taught your whole life that growth is good. So it must be. Right?
Wrong. Growth certainly gave us longer, healthier lives for a time, as well as an endless stream of iPhones, sneakers and cars. But while economists and corporate executives obsess over the myth that growth is our raison d’etre, the result is an economy strung out and addicted, lurching forward in search of its next growth fix.
The symptoms of growth addiction abound. Wall Street banks and financial institutions consolidating their might. A farming system pumping chemicals into food and inflicting widespread animal suffering. The military requesting ever-bigger budgets for more, deadlier killing tools to wreak havoc in far off places.
Symptomatic, too, are American worries about an unstable climate making fires, hurricanes and droughts the new normal. And about the housing crisis, another oil war in the Middle East, or plastic in our oceans.
In short, we are risking our livelihoods to feed our growth addiction.
This July 4th, together around the barbecue, let’s say ‘Enough!’ and declare ourselves free from this tyranny of growth. It is time for a Declaration of Independence from Growth.
I am pleased to tell you, confronting our growth addiction is a piece of red-white-and-blue cake. First, let’s admit our willful ignorance to growth’s colonization of our minds and institutions. This simple admission frees us to begin to change our lives and American society. Bearing witness to growth’s tyranny enables us to think and act differently.
Where growth screams scarcity, look instead for abundance. Rather than slavish competition, embrace cooperation and conviviality. Efficiency? How about sufficiency.
More than just thinking differently, let’s draw inspiration from others who have declared independence from growth. Social movements such as degrowth are gaining traction worldwide, as are myriad alternative groups and practices. They tell us: Yes, we can make growth independence real by embracing the already-existing revolutionary present.
Growth independence means more sharing home-cooked meals with family and friends, attending local community events, dusting off those long-forgotten bikes for journeys to the store, choosing to eat less meat, buying from local and independent shops, and volunteering at urban gardens.
It is the housing co-operative keeping rent affordable in a gentrifying neighborhood, the DIY shop where bike repair skills are shared, the social enterprise giving ex-convicts meaningful work, and the ‘tool library’ where a community borrows weed whackers, shovels, and saws.
By making growth independence the new normal, we can slow down our economy, improve our livelihoods, and save our planet. Let’s choose a United States of America that flourishes independent from growth, using fewer resources, oil and fossil fuels.
Abating the growth poison injected into the veins of politics requires our collective voice to stage an intervention. Let’s compel politicians to relocalize the economy and food system, address the housing crisis, reduce working hours, end our oil reliance and military overreach, and abolish growth-addicted industries like student debt, the private prison system, and corporate campaign financing.
So, this Fourth of July, it’s time, once again, to declare independence from a tyrant. Under the rockets’ red glare, join me in turning a brief break from work into a revolutionary moment.
Our addiction to growth is self-evident. But we are endowed with certain inalienable rights, among them the freedom to live well, and to live liberated from tyranny. Let us overthrow the tyrant’s grip and declare these United States of America independent from growth.