The Myth of Progress: Toward a Sustainable Future

THE MYTH OF PROGRESS

Toward a Sustainable Future

Updated Edition

TOM WESSELS

BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY PRESS

Waltham, Massachusetts

BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY PRESS

© 2013 University Press of New England

Preface to the Updated Edition © 2023 Tom Wessels

All rights reserved

Brandeis University Press updated edition published in 2023

Originally published by University Press of New England in 2006

Revised and expanded edition published by University Press of New England in 2013

Manufactured in the United States of America

Designed by Katherine B. Kimball

Typeset in Bembo and Optima by Passumpsic Publishing

For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact Brandeis University Press, 415 South Street, Waltham, MA 02453, or visit brandeisuniversitypress.com

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023932803

ISBN for the Brandeis updated edition: 978-1-68458-152-8

ISBN for the ebook Brandeis updated edition: 978-1-68458-153-5

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To the memory of Donella Meadows and her inspirational work

Contents

Preface to the Updated Edition

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Introduction

1. The Myth of Control: Complex versus Linear Systems

2. The Myth of Growth: Limits and Sustainability

3. The Myth of Energy: The Second Law of Thermodynamics

4. The Myth of the Free Market: The Loss of Diversity, Democracy, and Economic Resiliency

5. The Myth of Progress: A Need for Cultural Change

Epilogue: From Consumption to Connection

Glossary of Scientific Terms

Index

Preface to the Updated Edition

In 2018 the University Press of New England, publisher of The Myth of Progress: Toward a Sustainable Future, ceased its operations. Shortly after this Sue Ramin, director of Brandeis University Press, contacted me to see if I would be interested in having them become the new publisher of this book. I was delighted by this prospect, since I believe The Myth of Progress is the most important book I have written and I couldn’t bear the thought of it going out of print. This book was first published in 2006, and a revised edition came out in 2013. Now, in 2022 I am writing a new preface to accompany this third edition of The Myth of Progress.

I believe that at its core, creating a sustainable future is based on dramatically changing our current Western worldview. Others would counter this assessment, saying that all we really need are new technologies. I agree that appropriate technologies are an important tool, but on their own they won’t create a sustainable pathway to the future. Our course is charted by how we see ourselves in the world; if that view is flawed no amount of technology will correct it.

This does not mean we have to create a new worldview, but rather we have to return to one that guided humanity for the majority of its tenure on this planet. Modern Homo sapiens have existed on earth for at least 200,000 years. For more than 95 percent of that time people viewed themselves as a part of nature—not apart from it—and revered nature as their provider. Black Elk, the renowned Lakota prophet of the early twentieth century, stated it this way with his offering of the pipe in Black Elk Speaks.

Is not the sky a father and the earth a mother, and are not all living things with feet or wings or roots their children? And this hide upon the mouthpiece here, which should be bison hide, is for the earth, from whence we came and at whose breast we suck as babies all our lives, along with all the animals and birds and trees and grasses. And because it means all this, and more than any man can understand, the pipe is holy.¹

Another aspect of this indigenous worldview was the importance of community. For the vast majority of time, humans lived in gathering and hunting clan groups where the well-being of the clan was far more important than the well-being of any one individual. This was essential since people living on their own had poor rates of survivorship compared to people living communally and sharing all that they had. There were also no power hierarchies and all adults had a say in the decision making of the clan. So at its core this indigenous worldview was based in intimate relationships with nature and one’s human community.

Today that sensibility has been severely diminished in our society and replaced by notions of competition, control, ownership, materialism, and consumption. All of which are collectively, under the surface, working to disrupt and eventually dismantle this socioeconomic system. That may sound like an extreme assessment, yet I stand by it based on the following.

As I write in June 2022, we are well into the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the things that the pandemic has made obvious is the problems we are having with supply chains. At its core this is due to the fact that critical functional roles like transportation or production are handled by just a few competitive, corporate entities. When one of these corporations fails in their role, it dramatically impacts a supply chain.

The best recent example of this would be the present dramatic shortage of baby formula in the United States. Ninety percent of all baby formula consumed in the US is produced by just four manufacturers, with Abbott Nutrition dominating the sector by producing 40 percent of the nation’s formula. When their largest plant in Sturgis, Michigan, was shut down this spring, it quickly generated catastrophic shortages. All the sectors in the national and world economy are dominated by a small group of corporate entities, creating an economic system that is fragile and lacks resiliency.

At the same time, it is now evident that climate change is producing major impacts. The year 2022 finds the western half of the United States in a sustained, severe drought. Both Lake Mead and Lake Powell have lost close to 75 percent of their holding capacities, threatening electrical production and necessitating reductions in water supply. Given that the water held in these reservoirs supplies 40 million Americans, continued drought into the future will have very serious consequences.

Due to the drought more than 17 million acres of forestland burned in the western United States during the past two years. 2022 was looking like another year of massive western fires with over 2 million acres already consumed during the spring. However, compared to Siberia the fires in the United States appear minor, since ten times as much forestland has burned in that part of the world. It is estimated that the carbon dioxide released in the Siberian fires in 2021 is roughly equal to all the carbon released by Germany for that entire year.

In 2020, while California was burning in late October, Louisiana suffered its fifth direct hit by a hurricane that year, which was unprecedented in the state’s history. That year was a record-breaking hurricane season in the United States, with twenty-nine named storms and thirteen making landfall—nine being the previous record. What makes all of this more troubling is that the economic outlook and climate change are very much linked.

Both the International Monetary Fund and the World Economic Forum state that climate change is the greatest threat to the global economy, and they expect that Gross Domestic Product will continue to decline in the United States and around the world. That economic organizations are expressing alarm about the serious threats of climate change is eye opening. During the past two years weather-related damage averaged 120 billion dollars in the United States. If more dramatic steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are not taken, the Economist Intelligence Unit predicts that cost could rise to around 8 trillion globally by 2050. These costs would be derived from reductions in food production, as more significant droughts and flood events reduce agricultural productivity, and from the ever-greater impacts on infrastructure from severe storms, floods, fire, and sea-level rise. If nothing is done to counter climate change, in time it will start to dismantle our socioeconomic system.

Although this may be a dire outlook, we can turn it around if we make a collective commitment. While the current pandemic has caused great suffering, anxiety, and uncertainty, it has spawned some positive outcomes, such as the rise of small, local farms. The pandemic has shown that large-scale, industrial agricultural systems lacked the ability to deal with the impacts generated by the spread of the virus. They were too big to be resilient. Yet small, local farms experienced increases in their profits because the pandemic did not impact their operations, and people saw local foods as being far less risky vectors of viral transmission. This is good news since small, local farms are quite resilient, particularly with respect to climate change. Where large farms can’t protect themselves from the weather impacts of droughts and large-scale floods, small farms can. A great example of this is the Seeds of Solidarity Farm in Orange, Massachusetts.

Ricky Baruch and Deb Habib started this farm in the 1990s with a firm belief in working with nature rather than trying to dominate her. They never saw an example in the natural world where the soil was turned over every year, so they committed themselves to growing produce without tilling. They have now done this for over two decades. As a result, their soils are incredibly deep and fertile, and, unlike industrial farms, act as a carbon sink. Very high yields of produce per acre come from Seeds of Solidarity, all accomplished with just Ricky’s labor, now that Deb runs their not-for-profit organization. When I say with just Ricky’s labor, I mean it, because he uses no tractors or any form of farm machinery.

Ricky can do all the labor by himself. Using the no-till method, he has no problem with weeds, so his work is basically planting and harvesting. He has a small solar array that runs drip lines in his hoop houses, where he grows greens that can be clipped for harvest and grow back many times to be clipped again. Because of these features he can mitigate weather impacts, making his farm incredibly resilient. We very often hear that in order to feed all the people on this planet we need large-scale, industrial agriculture. What Ricky and Deb are showing is another approach—one where we can produce as much food per acre, if not more, as large-scale industrial farms without using any fertilizers, pesticides, or farm machinery. To do so, we just need a lot of small-scale farmers committed to working with nature.

What we get in return is healthier food and a far more resilient agricultural system, where farms take in more greenhouse gases then they release, as their soils become carbon sinks. This last point is important because large-scale, industrial agriculture is one of the major emitters of greenhouse gases. What is striking about Ricky and Deb’s approach is that the only technologies they use are hoop houses and solar-powered drip lines. They are showing that it is not sophisticated technological approaches that create a sustainable pathway, but a holistic worldview centered on respecting and working with nature.

I do not believe we can count on the federal government of the United States to offer leadership in turning things around. In the first chapter of this book—The Myth of Control—I point out that in complex social systems, large-scale change always bubbles up from the populace, while governments try to maintain the status quo. Women’s suffrage and more recently same-sex marriage are two good examples. Hopefully, we will see similar success for true civil rights for people of color, which is currently such a major issue. If we are going to turn things around and chart a sustainable path, the work will have to be done by citizens.

In our communities we need to intentionally work to create more resiliency by finding ways to help each other, support small-scale, local and regional businesses and initiatives, and work hard to be more frugal in our use of energy and material resources. In fact, small, local businesses and frugality are directly linked. Small-scale businesses, like Seeds of Solidarity Farm, are not heavily invested in mechanization the way large-scale operations are. Once a business latches onto mechanization, its consumption of energy and materials increases dramatically. This is not just about the energy to run the machines, but also about the embedded energy in the machines themselves. This includes all the energy needed to extract the raw materials, refine those materials, fashion them into parts, then into machines, that then get shipped to where they will be put into use. Although all of this embedded energy is hidden from view, it results in large environmental impacts.

Consider the embedded energy in ground beef from a small grass-fed farm like Walpole Valley Farms in Walpole, NH, where we get our meat. Producing this meat does involve some embedded energy since they have farm tractors to cut hay and spread manure. There is also some embedded energy in their fencing, barns, and processing equipment, and in our ten-mile drive to their farm store. Now contrast that to the amount of embedded energy in the same quantity of ground beef from a hamburger producer like McDonald’s.

First off, the steers used for McDonald’s beef are usually grain fed. That adds a lot of embedded energy, because growing grain requires a much larger energy investment than growing hay. The steers are shipped hundreds of miles to processing plants, which requires a lot of fuel consumption. After the animals are butchered machines grind the meat, form it into patties, box them, and freeze them for storage. The burgers are then shipped hundreds of miles to distribution centers, and finally into retail outlets, each move again consuming lots of energy. I have no idea what the actual embedded energy in McDonald’s ground beef hamburgers is compared to the same product from Walpole Valley Farms, but I do know it is many times greater.

In the third chapter—The Myth of Energy, which focuses on the second law of thermodynamics—I show that there