>>7827304The likelihood now is that our children and grandchildren will inherent worsening condition of life, relative to ourselves. This point of worsening has already began since the 1970s. So true progress might entail the opposite of what most might call progress i.e. the end of economic “growth”. This raises the question about what to do with people in poverty. Perhaps the true progress here is to talk less about growth and more about sharing. In order to solve poverty in a world where we are awashed in riches and wealth at a level of all time historical decadence, where there are people who are poor, surely the answer is the rich need to give up a little of what they have and share. Once this is done the idea for growth is by no means clear any longer. We have yet to give up the idea that progress is linear and endless, there is only a sense of linearity. This is mainly achieved due to the fact that we are historical beings, and learn from our history. But we can lose knowledge, if we look back at the middle ages we lost a great deal of knowledge, and can go even further, societies can even collapse. In fact what we find when you look at collapsed societies is that most often they collapsed if they sought to progress endlessly. If the idea of endless growth is anti-biological does that mean society is doomed from the start? The very idea of “economic growth” is a bastardization because it fantasizes the economy as an organism while trying to extricate the idea of maturity. This is a profound problem. In the event of a society collapsing the survivors learn how to be more sustainable. An attempt to answer this paradox if, on one hand, we look at indigenous peoples as these paragons of ecological virtue and on the other, indigenous people destroyed all the megafauna. Both are true. Although they destroyed many of the conditions for their lives they lived from the destruction and have learned ecological wisdom.
