Zero growth

Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future
By Bill McKibben
Times , 261 pp., $25

In the fall of 2004, Bill McKibben undertook what he calls a "modest experiment." He resolved to spend the next six months -- months that included January, February, and March -- eating nothing but locally grown food. Owing to the consolidation of American agriculture, and the fact that McKibben lives in central Vermont, the challenge was substantial. Not only did it mean no coffee, or bananas, or potato chips, or chocolate, it meant, in the middle of winter, no vegetables -- save for root crops -- that hadn't been frozen. (The challenge would have been even more daunting had it not been for a single farmer who still, stubbornly, grows wheat in the Champlain Valley.) The experiment had a two fold purpose. On the one hand, McKibben wanted to learn how much agricultural infrastructure was left in the region. On the other, he wanted to consider alternatives to the deracinated, globalized, chemically fertilized, microwave-on-high-for-one-minute ethos that underlies contemporary life. At the end of the period, he reports in his new book, "Deep Economy ," he probably had spent less money on food -- eating a locally produced egg for breakfast turns out to be less expensive than, say, eating Cheerios -- but a great deal more time on it. "I've had to think about every meal, instead of wandering through the world on autopilot," he writes.

It is now nearly 20 years since McKibben's disturbing -- and prescient -- "The End of Nature" first brought global warming to popular attention. Since then, McKibben has written nine more books, and in each one he has continued to challenge comfortable assumptions -- about the media ("The Age of Missing Information"), family life ("Maybe One"), and technological innovation ("Enough "). In "Deep Economy," he takes on America's faith in growth, which has become, in his words, the "untrumpable hand."

McKibben argues that the economic expansion of the last several decades has been misinterpreted by politicians on both the left and the right, and by a lot of economists to boot. Wealth that seems to flow from myriad technological innovations can all be traced back to a single source: fossil fuels. (One way to think of it, McKibben suggests, is that we are living off the labor of energy slaves.) It is the ever-accelerating exploitation of this limited resource that has, paradoxically, made our belief in limitless growth possible. Meanwhile, even if coal and oil were not finite, continuing to consume them at today's pace will have disastrous consequences. Already, we have altered the composition of the atmosphere enough to cause generally rising temperatures for the next several decades. If we remain on our current trajectory, then by the end of this century the planet will be warmer than it has been for several million years. No one knows exactly what life will be like at that point but, as McKibben observes, "almost every guess is hideous."

McKibben is not the first writer to question the premise of limitless growth. (Thomas Malthus's "Essay on the Principle of Population" first appeared in 1798.) In the 1960s, the economist Kenneth Boulding proposed that Americans stop thinking of the world as an open system -- a "cowboy economy" -- and start thinking of it as a closed system -- a "spaceman economy." ("Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist," Boulding once remarked.) In the '70s E. F. Schumacher published his bestselling "Small Is Beautiful," in which he argued, "Nothing makes economic sense unless its continuance for a long time can be projected without running into absurdities."

But this sort of questioning was interrupted right around the time Americans discovered SUV s and 4,000-square- foot houses. As a result, McKibben's message couldn't be more urgently needed. As he notes, China's economy is growing at such a rate that by 2031 the nation's 1.3 billion residents will be nearly as rich as we are. If they use resources at the same rate that we do, they will consume 99 million barrels of oil a day, which is 20 million more barrels than is currently consumed worldwide, and burn 2.8 billion tons of coal a year, which is also more than present worldwide production.

Figures like these -- and there are many of them in "Deep Economy" -- are deeply frightening. One of the book's great strengths is that it presses beyond the statistics to imagine a different way of doing things. This is where eating locally comes in. Growing food on huge, corporate-owned farms may be more profitable, but it turns out that small farms generate higher yields per acre. They use resources like water and oil more efficiently. Meanwhile, small farms hold communities together. They connect people to the land, and to each other. All of which means that by consuming less, we might actually find that we had gained something.

In the end, it turns out that McKibben shares less with Malthus than with Henry David Thoreau, another New Englander who changed his life as an experiment. A deep strain of optimism -- even idealism -- runs through "Deep Economy," and that is why, for all its attention to our failures, the book is inspiring to read. "Deep Economy" shows us not only the way we need to live, but also the way we should want to.

Elizabeth Kolbert is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author, most recently, of "Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change."