I grew up in a small South African town 16,000 kilometers and more than a hundred years away from America’s Wild West, but nevertheless watched many a cheap Saturday morning movie set in the mesquite and chaparral of that mythically violent but oddly honorable land. They mostly had similar themes — honest, hard-working homesteading family set upon by a variety of villains, whether cattle barons, railroad tycoons, “eastern” mining companies and more, each capitalist with armies of thugs for hire, ready to drive our hero off his land. One of the most common revolved around the hapless prospector (usually shown with pickax and mule to show his essential poverty) who finds a rich seam of gold, somewhere up in them thar hills, but never gets to stake his claim, either because he is killed by thugs on the way to the claims office, or because said thugs have raced ahead and filed ahead of him. All generally worked out by the end of the final reel; the prospector (or if dead, his deserving family) vindicated, and villainous mining corporation driven off, often with the help of a virtuous senator or otherwise honest politician. An oddly anti-capitalist saga, for the America of the post-Depression and I Like Ike years.

Unasked, in all this, was a simple question: who owns the gold in the first place? The answer would have been, of course, whoever finds it first.

Those days in the Bijou came back to me after an anecdote told me by Maurice Strong, who had recently chaired the Rio conference on the environment that had come to be called the Earth Summit. Maurice, and a company he controlled, had come into possession of one of Colorado’s historic cattle ranches, the 1823 grant to Luis Maria Cabeza de Baca and still known as the Baca Grande Ranch, in Comanche country near Crestone, looking out on the Sangre de Cristo mountains. Among its other assets, the ranch happened to sit on top of one of the west’s great untapped aquifers. Maurice’s company got into dispute with others about this water. First of all, his opponents suspected he wanted to “mine” the water and ship it north to Canada, a nice reversal of the conventional power politics between the two countries. Then, when it became clear that he really didn’t want to do anything with it, claims were filed by other parties demanding access. The legal rationale was simple: in much of the west, water rights operated under the “use it or lose it” principle. If you didn’t use the water, others had to right to appropriate it and use it themselves. There really couldn’t be a clearer anti-conservationist ethic.

Who owned the gold that the prospectors found in all those Westerns? Who owned the water under Maurice Strong’s Baca Grande ranch? The answer is, no one, everyone, anyone.

The question can be extended indefinitely. Who owns, say, the natural gas deposits that have lain, untapped, under the ocean near Sable Island, a hundred kilometers from my house? Who owns the Gorgon gas field under Barrow Island off Australia’s west coast? Who owns the methane hydrate deposits off the shore of New Jersey? Who owns the limestone deposits under California’s central coast (deposits that yield up some of the world’s sublime wines)? Who owns the great boreal forests of Alaska, Siberia, and Canada? Who owns the rocks of the earth? Who, indeed, owns the air? The birds of the air? The water? The oceans? Fish stocks? Who owns the whales?

Who owns nature?

And then another set of questions, about another kind of commonwealth: who owns culture? Who owns languages, science, the accumulated genius of technology? Who owns history? Who owns, in short, the human library? Who owns it, and who has the right to sell it?

In an empty world, these questions, or at least the ones about nature, didn’t much matter. Nature seemed inexhaustible. Still, natural philosophers, as scientists were once called, have wrestled with the issue for millennia, as have political authorities. In Roman times, the Senate put together a series of laws that classified several aspects of what came to be called “the commons” as explicitly owned by the people collectively. These res communes, common things, included water and the air, but also “bodies of water,” that is lakes, and shorelines generally. Wild animals, as opposed to domesticated ones, were included. After the Roman empire collapsed, overrun by what the Romans were pleased to call barbarians, some aspects of the res communes came into dispute — feudal lords, and then kings, claimed to control them.

The implications of a commons is that since no one owns it, anyone can use it, exploit it, and pollute it at no charge.

So where, in a well-ordered world, do private property rights stop? How best to treat the commons so it survives for the benefit of all? How best to allocate the profits that flow from what exploitation is allowed? Private property is the engine of prosperity. Common property is the backdrop before which private actors perform. Both are necessary. So an answer is critical. We have three economic sectors: the private sector, the public (or state) sector and the commons sector. Only the last has no body of law to protect it, and no accounting systems for its profits or losses.

So the question becomes: if the various natural systems of the earth, especially the air, the water, the land and its minerals, and the complex life systems they sustain, are indeed “the commons,” how do we guard against the “tragedy of the commons?” If no one owns the resource and anyone can use it, how do we protect it from depletion?

The tragedy of the commons as a phrase owes its origins to Garrett Hardin’s essay in Science magazine in 1968, though the notion of a social trap involving a conflict between individual interests and the common good goes back, at least, to Aristotle.

Here is Hardin’s description of the tragedy :

Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy. As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks, “What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?” This utility has one negative and one positive component. The positive component is a function of the increment of one animal. Since the herdsman receives all the proceeds from the sale of the additional animal, the positive utility is [obvious]. The negative component is a function of the additional overgrazing created by one more animal. Since, however, the effects of overgrazing are shared by all the herdsmen, the negative utility for any particular decision-making herdsman is only a fraction [of the burden] … The rational herdsman concludes [from this] that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another, and another … But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit, in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.

Hardin’s argument was widely accepted by economists and free-market enthusiasts. The solution to the dilemma, it seemed obvious, was privatization, the enclosure of the commons.

But it is not obvious. Hardin’s theory was the purest poppycock, and widely adopted only because it seemed to convey the essence of free market competition. It was a truly corporatist view.

The main error was to adopt a key proposition of the free market, and of Adam Smith’s, that man is a rational being who always acts in his own best interests, and then to assume that those interests automatically involved multiplication of personal assets. But what Hardin was describing was not rational behavior — it was the purest selfishness. And there is, after all, a crucial difference. A rational being, faced with a dilemma of the commons, would be able to calculate long-term prospects and conclude, quite rationally, that some sort of short-term limit, arrived at through negotiation, would be in his own interests. In other words, in the context of a limited commons, cooperation is a more rational decision than independence. Hardin derived his views from biology — he wasn’t an economist — and preferred a hard-line version of Darwinism called, not surprisingly, survival of the fittest. But “fit” was interpreted narrowly and stripped of its social context. Hardin simply assumed that when men came together without rules, violence or conflict ensued. He had no knowledge of the equally Darwinist view that natural selection could just as easily select for mutual cooperation as for continual family warfare, a view that has been gaining credence among biological evolutionists in the past few decades. He took no account, therefore, of the human ability to develop rules for accessing and using common resources.

Cooperation, when you look for it, is not hard to find. Fishermen in several places have banded together to set sustainable catch quotas. The same thing is true, as Jonathan Rowe pointed out in an essay for WorldWatch, in the rice paddies of the Philippines, in the Swiss Alpine pasturelands, the Maine lobster fishery, the Pacific haddock fishery, and many other places. The case could even be made that as long as settled communities remain intact, the commons flourishes. The community merely needs to be enabled to protect it.

–

Marq de Villiers is an award-winning writer of books and articles on exploration, history, politics, and travel.  He is also a graduate of the London School of Economics, and his latest book puts his training in economics to good use.  Our Way Out: Principles for a Post-Apocalyptic World offers a refreshing menu of economic options for an overly consumptive population living on an environmentally stressed planet.

Choosing a college (not to mention getting in) can be a trying experience, especially for the nerdier souls among us. In my case, I had absolutely no plan for what to do with the rest of my life, so I selected a big university that offered degrees and classes in everything. I figured that I could explore several branches of knowledge, take a few detours down unusual alleys of academia, and figure something out for my future along the way. That’s how I ended up in Marketing 101 as a freshman. And reflecting on the offerings of that class, I’m pretty sure the whole thing was based on an erroneous assumption.

Before attending the class, I didn’t really know what marketing was. In fact my preconceived notions about marketing came mostly from cartoon characters who inhabited the Technicolor landscape of sugary breakfast cereals: Count Chocula, Tony the Tiger, Cap’n Crunch, the cuckoo bird who becomes agitated in the presence of artificial choco-balls, and the leprechaun who refuses to share his bounty of marshmallows with sugar-starved children. The class was structured around the 4 P’s (product, price, place, and promotion), a mnemonic to remind students that a marketer has to consider an awful lot of stuff to sell a product. Much to my disappointment, neither the professor nor the textbook entered the realm of children’s breakfast cereals, but we certainly did explore case studies from other sectors to get a sense of what makes a successful marketing strategy.

What feats of marketing can differentiate these two seemingly identical products? Wouldn’t this be the most instructive marketing case study of all time?

The first and most carefully considered case study was the United Colors of Benetton. It was all about “branding.” We studied how the company had used international flair and bright colors to sell lots and lots of clothes. The point for us students was to learn some things about branding that might help us blossom into successful marketers. Looking at that class in the rearview mirror today, I see that a faulty assumption formed the foundation of everything we studied. Let’s call it the BIG ASSUMPTION. Simply put, the BIG ASSUMPTION is that more is better. Without question, the Benettons of the business world should always sell more, and marketing techniques should be used to achieve that outcome.

Why is the BIG ASSUMPTION always there, and why does it go unquestioned, especially at a university with a big-name business school? It all has to do with visibility. The upsides of successful marketing campaigns — of selling more — show up right in front of our faces, popping with bold, Benetton colors. When you sell more, you get more money. And more money gets you more perks — more jobs, more toys, more status, more choices about where you live, what you eat, and what you wear. This lesson gets ingrained in our thinking and worldview from an early age. By college, I certainly understood it.

I used to go to the ATM in the student union to take out cash for food on the weekends (the dining halls were closed on Saturdays and Sundays). On one such occasion, I stuck my card in the machine, entered my PIN, and hit the button for “account balance.” The machine spit out a slip of paper that reported my life savings at $11.43. Next I punched the buttons to request a withdrawal of $5 (that way, I’d still have $5 for the next weekend). While the machine was taking its time to count all those bills, I noticed a pile of discarded account slips strewn atop the machine. I sifted through them while the ATM continued to sift through its stacks of cash for my $5. Many accounts were of the 5-digit variety — lots of rich kids at college. As I prepared to go searching for the best deal on noodles, I couldn’t help but think what sort of gourmet meals I might be able to get with a 5-digit account instead of a 5 dollar bill.

So it’s really quite simple. The assumption to which marketing students (and just about every participant in the economy) submit is this:

More sales (through more marketing) = more money = more consumption of goods and services = better lives.

But blind submission to this assumption generates plenty of downsides. If Benetton keeps selling more, and Kellogg’s keeps selling more, and GM, and Sony, and Exxon, and Apple, and Wal-Mart, and on and on, we find ourselves bumping up against the limits to growth. But the consequences are much less visible. It’s hard to notice the climate warming. It’s hard to notice species going extinct. It’s hard to notice the drawdown of aquifers. It’s hard to… (ok, ok, you get the point). The downsides of accepting the BIG ASSUMPTION are less visible than the upsides, but there’s also another problem. The upsides accrue to a select few, while the downsides accrue to society at large. As Benetton sells more and more shirts, it makes more and more profits. Its employees enjoy higher salaries and more status. At the same time, it does not suffer the consequences from increased emissions and use of natural resources — someone somewhere else, often sometime in the future, feels the pain. In essence, the economy operates by concentrating benefits and diffusing costs, especially for those businesses with the most successful marketing departments.

To debunk an assumption, especially one with the visibility problems of the BIG ASSUMPTION, you have to study. You have to learn about the concealed downsides. For the BIG ASSUMPTION, that means studying ecology and understanding (to the extent we can) the science behind environmental systems. The author and activist Bill McKibben is certainly someone who has done his homework. His studies have led him to question the BIG ASSUMPTION. On the first page of his book, Deep Economy, he writes:

For most of human history, the two birds More and Better roosted on the same branch. You could toss one stone and hope to hit them both. That’s why the centuries since Adam Smith have been devoted to the dogged pursuit of maximum economic production…  But the distinguishing feature of our moment is this: Better has flown a few trees over to make her nest. That changes everything. Now, if you’ve got the stone of your own life, or your own society, gripped in your hand, you have to choose between them. It’s More or Better.

I vant to sell you crud!

More Count Chocula actually makes everyone worse off, except of course for the few people who manufacture and market Count Chocula. By the day, it becomes more and more obvious that it’s time to replace the outdated fixation on More with a modern appreciation of Enough. The challenge is to configure the economy in such a way that people and organizations can pursue Better instead of More. Maybe we can start by overhauling Marketing 101.

by Brian Czech

“Failure breeds success,” I hope some famous person once said. For I have failed to accomplish the goal set out in Part 1 of Technological Progress for Dummies. The goal was to summarize an article — in plain language and in less than a thousand words — that described why technological progress cannot reconcile the conflict between economic growth and environmental protection. I found I couldn’t do it without several thousand words, and too much plain language is as difficult to digest as a dollop of jargon. As for the article itself, it’s long and full of jargon.

And now for the successful offspring of such abject failure. (Drumroll, please.) I can successfully say that most folks have tightened a nut or two.

In the old days you would have used a monkey wrench. Then a tidbit of technological progress happened and you had a box wrench, which allowed you to tighten that nut a tad more efficiently. When they finally invented the ratcheting socket wrench, you were really in business. It seemed like you could tighten far more nuts with the same amount of elbow grease; five nuts to one when you threw in some coffee!

Such is the basic pattern of technological progress. Invention and innovation allow you to do more with less. Well ok, maybe not actually “less.” If you tighten five nuts to one, you’re prone to using five times the nuts. And the ratchet set is something you have to add to the toolbox. But you can definitely tighten more nuts without working harder, so in workaday parlance, you’re doing “more with less.” If you want to get technical about it, you could say you’re producing more output per unit input. Your productivity is increasing.

For the economy as a whole, productivity increases with technological progress. It’s an impressive process; nearly awesome at some points in history. It makes us proud of the human race, boosts our confidence, makes us think the sky is the limit. Many are even led to believe we can grow the economy without impacting the environment. After all, if we can do more with less, how about doing more with a lot less?

And why stop there? If we invent and innovate enough, maybe we can do more with no more! We can just keep growing GDP without using any more wood, water, minerals, petroleum — natural resources in general. No more steel, nuts, or tools. No more stuff, no more energy.

It’s reminiscent of the alcoholic announcing, “I’m not drinkin’ any more, but just as much.” We may not be using more natural resources to produce more goods and services, but if we’re still using the same amount we can’t really say we’ve stopped impacting the environment, can we? Especially since we had to dig deeper for the minerals, drill deeper for the petroleum, etc. And notice we haven’t even mentioned the flow of pollution (and won’t, to keep things simpler.)

So it’s time for the really big guns. Now we’re going to produce more, not only with way less, not only with no more, but with nothing at all! We’ll just beam it all up. Why not? After all, research and development expenditures in the United States alone are some $300 billion per year. That oughta buy us out of any problem, including this one! That’s why economists like Robert L. Bradley, Jr. announce, “Natural resources originate from the mind, not from the ground, and therefore are not depletable.”

Now if you’re a scientist worth your stellarator, you can see through the subterfuge in a nanosecond. The first law of thermodynamics tells you there’s no producing something from nothing. You can’t even get perfectly efficient with the resources you do use, because that would violate the second law of thermodynamics. So there’s a limit to technological progress — doing more with less — as it applies to the full collection of materials at our disposal along with the energy we receive from the sun.

The problem remains, however, that for purposes of plain language, the laws of thermodynamics and even the phrase “laws of thermodynamics” don’t cut it. Only in plain language can we make a difference in everyday life and public policy. That’s why President Obama signed the Plain Language Act of 2010.

So here’s some more nuts and bolts. Remember how doing “more with less” leads to five times the nuts? Tell your local Robert L. Bradley, Jr. that we shall all refuse to tighten five times the nuts without five times the bolts and washers, along with additional material to be tightened. And if we’re assembling things for market — quite necessary for GDP growth — we’re now assembling more of them. That leads to more transportation, storage, and retail services. More electricity all around, too, along with the wiring, fuses, bulbs and such. Plus that power plant in the background, with all the nuts and bolts therein.

Now with this type of expansion going on everywhere that the proverbial nuts are tightened (all around the world, in other words), information services help to orchestrate it all. Everybody better have a computer, cell phone, and Twitter feed. Operating at this level, you may as well start advertising, too. Banking, insurance, and other service sectors will also play an expanded role.

Notice that, in addition to not even mentioning the flow of pollution, we also haven’t mentioned the agricultural sector — farming in plain language. But of course we’re going to need plenty of it, to feed all the folks with the manufacturing and service jobs. With all the food they’ll have to produce, they’ll need cell phones and GPS units in the air-conditioned cabs of those 30-foot-wide combines. And plenty of extra nuts and bolts.

So that old ’90′s notion that we could keep growing the “Information Economy” without using more resources — and without any more environmental impact — was like a highly productive conversion of grass into bullpies. All that information, which was supposed to beam us up to Shangri-La, was nothing if not tied into the regular old economy down on the farm and everywhere else in the Land of Nuts and Bolts. The computer was nothing more than the ratcheting socket wrench of the IT sector, which was distributing marching orders for an ever-larger ecological footprint.

At a thousand words now, I’m thinking this is all the success my failure can breed. Enough for one column at least. Someday I may also find a way to convert that earlier-mentioned article, condensing concepts such as niche breadth, trophic levels, and economies of scale into plain language of a thousand words or less, refuting the macroeconomic environmental Kuznets curve and solving the Jevons paradox (which really isn’t so paradoxical) in the process.

But it’ll drive some nuts. In fact, many more nuts, albeit more efficiently.

Not you, CASSE signatory. You’re no dummy. You already know that the fundamental conflict between economic growth and environmental protection can’t be overcome with technological progress.

But we’re all dummies about something. Most of us are dummies about toothpick manufacturing, for example. Toothpick dummies range from presidents to pot-scrubbers. So do plasma physics dummies, Arabic language dummies, and root canal instrument dummies. So don’t take this the wrong way if you think technological progress can overcome the conflict between economic growth and environmental protection. You may be wrong about that, but you are legion!

Now among dummies, there’s dumb and dumber. That’s just the way it is. But toothpick dummies and other specific dummies can be smart overall. So the generally smart and smarter are specifically dumb and dumber.

Technological progress sure brings out the dumb in the smarter. This I discovered by trying to get scientific organizations to adopt positions on economic growth. Invariably, the biggest hurdle was the notion that, with technological progress, economic growth and environmental protection could go hand-in-hand.

And frankly, it is an extremely difficult notion to refute, at least in plain language. It’s different if you’re a physicist; you probably get it immediately. You know that, no matter how much invention and innovation, you can’t make something from nothing and you can’t get perpetually more efficient. You know it because you’re steeped in the first two laws of thermodynamics.

But there we go, with “laws of thermodynamics,” already outside the vernacular, way beyond plain language. Few among us are physicists. Legion are we thermodynamic dummies, from presidents to pot-scrubbers.

That doesn’t mean you must be a physicist to get it. Farmers tend to get it too, as do many people who work with their hands, city or country. The fact that you can’t make something from nothing, that you can’t have your cake and eat it too, is really a matter of common sense. Or it should be.

The problem is that common sense is not very common any more. It’s been vanquished by disingenuous marketers, truth-bending politicians, and scholarly “smart-dummies” (generally smart, specifically dumb on technological progress) who have legions thinking there is no limit to economic growth. But surely it’s not far below the surface. Surely there is latent common sense to invoke.

For several years in the early 2000′s, I looked high and low for a thorough explanation of why technological progress could not reconcile the conflict between economic growth and environmental protection. I felt I had common sense — horse sense, farm sense, construction sense — and I couldn’t believe the best-selling authors blathering about perpetual growth in the “information economy” and the politicians chanting the mantra, “there is no conflict between growing the economy and protecting the environment.” All this was based on a fuzzy notion of technological progress, and had most Americans (64% according to a Roper poll) believing there was no limit to economic growth. So I searched for scientific literature to refute the fallacious rhetoric.

Much to my chagrin, there was almost nothing. There were rigorous explanations for limits to growth, most notably by our Daly News namesake. Herman Daly had used laws of thermodynamics to demonstrate limits to growth and to advocate a steady state economy. He and others also described how economic growth required natural capital, which helped to explain the basic trade-off between growth and environmental protection. All this implied that technological progress could not reconcile the trade-off, at least in the long run, and here and there were statements to that effect.

There were also critiques of technological progress that were focused less on limits to growth and more on cultural impacts. Perhaps the most famous was by E. F. Schumacher in Small is Beautiful. Schumacher called for “appropriate technology.”

Yet there seemed to be a missing concept. Nowhere was there a thorough, rigorous, and compelling explanation for why technological progress could not allow a nation, or the world, to continue growing the economy without necessarily degrading the environment in the process. After all, there seemed to be many examples of technological progress that helped protect the environment, even in the midst of rapid economic growth. These examples, along with the lack of a rigorous trade-off thesis, explained why legions were unwilling to acknowledge limits to growth, or even a trade-off between economic growth and environmental protection.

It also explains why very smart dummies in academia, government, and the private sector are paid handsomely for “science and technology policy” affairs. These folks are often brilliant in general terms, and about many specific topics, yet many are dumber than a boot about the relationships among economic growth, technological progress, and environmental protection. Invariably they recognize that economic growth and technological progress are tightly linked, and they know that many new technologies are “greener.” They therefore figure it’s a slam dunk that economic growth may be reconciled with environmental protection via technological progress. For them, the object of science and technology policy is to steer science toward providing technological progress, thereby growing the economy and protecting the environment. It’s a classic win-win!

Partly because they’re paid so handsomely, jetting from conference to conference, most others think they must be experts on the subject. They should, therefore, be believed. Meanwhile, because their win-win message is political gold, politicians find them useful. Smart-dummies are appointed to high governmental posts, becoming more credible yet in the eyes of the public.

If you go to a typical science and technology policy conference, you’ll find one group of speakers talking about where the money for science is coming from or could come from. Another group will point to where the money is going; what kind of science is being conducted, who is conducting it, and what new technologies are coming online as a result. Another group will address what it means to the environment, and another will address what it means to the economy. Keynote speakers weave these threads into the tired message that we need newer technology and therefore more science – we’ll just have to find funding for it – so we can continue growing the economy while protecting the environment. Then it’s time for wine and hors d’ oeuvres and planning for the next highfalutin conference.

Clearly we have to look elsewhere for a clear description of why the conflict between economic growth and environmental protection cannot be reconciled with technological progress. Ideally this description would not rely exclusively on the laws of thermodynamics, either, but could be put in much plainer language. That would make it relevant to the public and policy makers.

When I found no such description during those years around 2000, I decided to attempt it myself. The experience was daunting and taught me how easy it would be to slip into accepting the idea of perpetual economic growth, or at least the idea of reconciling growth with environmental protection for extended periods of time. But I got lucky in stumbling upon an overlooked concept — maybe the overlooked concept in these matters. It’s a concept necessary to explain how economic growth and technological progress can continue in lockstep, but not without environmental degradation. It’s actually a well-known concept in the economics profession, but hadn’t been applied to the issue at hand. I stumbled upon it while studying the methods and findings of national income accounting, especially the findings of the late Edward Denison, a pioneer in the measurement of GDP.

Now I won’t claim that the concept — “economies of scale” — is exactly plain language either. Yet it is much plainer than laws of thermodynamics. For one thing, far more citizens are businessmen than physicists, and economies of scale resonate with them.

I wrote it all up in a peer-reviewed paper published in 2008 for the journal Conservation Biology. The paper isn’t plasma physics, but neither is it plain language. So I haven’t yet completed the plain-language part of the task. There’s no better place to try than the Daly News.

Frankly, I’m not sure I can do it, and I’m not sure it can be done by anyone. The topic may be just tricky enough to defy the vernacular. We’ll see how it goes in the conclusion of this two-part column next week…

Early in 2011 UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon issued a profound condemnation of the global economy’s ill-conceived pattern of growth: “For most of the past century, economic growth was fueled by what seemed to be a certain truth: the abundance of natural resources. We mined our way to growth. We burned our way to prosperity. We believed in consumption without consequences. These days are gone… Over time, that model is a recipe for national disaster. It is a global suicide pact.” (Spoken at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, January 2011).

That’s a somber statement, but there’s hope that the U.S. will break free from this “global suicide pact” and develop a fundamentally different economy.  My prediction for 2012:  decentralized forces, formed in response to the unsustainable and unfair economic situation, will begin to fundamentally change how our national economy works. People in the Occupy Wall Street movement and groups working on human rights, public health, clean energy, and social and tax justice are laying the groundwork for a shift to a steady state — a dynamic and sustainable economy that pursues prosperity and full employment without GDP growth.

The grassroots mobilization to support clean energy and a healthy environment is a sign of the shift to come. The work of diverse groups protesting the dirty tar sands pipeline from Canada to Texas motivated a huge turnout at the White House, with over 1,000 people being arrested. These protests were strong enough to get President Obama’s attention.  He delayed a decision on the pipeline and elevated the issue to center stage on the Republican agenda.

Statistics give us another hint that we’re headed in the right direction toward a steady state economy in 2012. Despite efforts by the Republican Congressional Leadership to undermine environmental protections (e.g., ongoing denial of climate change and attempts to gut EPA regulations), U.S. emissions have dropped by 7% in the last four years and are in line to drop further. Vehicle miles driven have declined, and ridership of public transportation is up 2%.

A cynic might say that the reason is simply the recession, but that’s only a small part of the story. Important actions such as renewable energy standards at the city and state levels are helping. Religious congregations participating in the Interfaith Power and Light initiative are reducing their carbon footprints. The campaign to shut down coal power plants and the substitution of natural gas for coal are also significant. Coal used to be the source of over half of U.S. electricity, but its share dropped to 43% in the first half of 2011 and is scheduled to drop even further.

As we enter 2012, we should redouble our support of those groups pushing for an economic paradigm shift based on sound governance and the principles of a just democracy. And it’s time to build a broad coalition of such groups to include those working on clean energy, public health, climate stabilization, financial reform, and other pieces of a sustainable economic system. Growing support for these groups and mutual reinforcement among them will provide the necessary spark to ignite the economic shift.

As we push for a just, environmentally sustainable world, we must continue to highlight the unabashed attempts by the richest one percent to continue fleecing the rest of us. December has featured a full array of proposed new financial gimmicks and tax breaks to benefit the very rich. For example, corporations with billions stashed in offshore tax havens are now seeking to bring these funds back to the U.S. with minimal tax under a so-called “Repatriation Act.”  They’re angling for a repeat of their lucrative repatriation flim-flam in 2004, a plan that saw 15 corporations bring back $150 billion at a 5 and ¼% tax rate instead of 35%. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found that these 15 companies did not add jobs or increase research expenditures, but rather increased spending on executive pay and stock buybacks. Now more companies are petitioning Congress to allow them once again to bring the loot back home with the same tax break.

Although the U.S. Chamber of Commerce strongly supports such repatriation, the Women’s Chamber of Commerce, with 500,000 dues-paying members, opposes it. The members of the Women’s Chamber of Commerce aren’t benefiting from the offshore tax havens or the repatriation scams.

As 2011 gives way to 2012, outrage is in the air.  But that can be useful for uniting and motivating people of conscience across the political spectrum to work for change — to break free of the suicide pact described by Ban Ki-Moon. Mr. Ban has called on governments to supply “visionary recommendations” for the upcoming Rio+20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development in June of 2012. Here are two recommendations that, at this point in history, seem obvious, but would certainly be radical in the business-as-usual economy:

1. Stop pursuing the ruinous pipe dream of continuous economic growth and work toward a steady state economy.
2. Take power back from the oligarchy of the 1% to reclaim our democracy.

Best wishes for the new year.

Note from the editor:  The Natural Resources Forum (vol. 35, no. 4) asked 29 experts, including Herman Daly, “What do you think should be the two or three highest priority political outcomes of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), scheduled for Rio de Janeiro in June 2012?”  His answer succinctly sums up the steady-state perspective.

The conclusion of the 1972 Limits to Growth study by the Club of Rome still stands 40 years later. Even though economies are still growing, and still put growth in first place, it is no longer economic growth, at least in wealthy countries, but has become uneconomic growth. In other words, the environmental and social costs of increased production are growing faster than the benefits, increasing “illth” faster than wealth, thereby making us poorer, not richer. We hide the uneconomic nature of growth from ourselves by faulty national accounting because growth is our panacea, indeed our idol, and we are very afraid of the idea of a steady-state economy. The increasing illth is evident in exploding financial debt, in biodiversity loss, and in destruction of natural services, most notably climate regulation. The major job of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development is to help us overcome this denial and shift the path of progress from quantitative growth to qualitative development, from bigger to better. Specifically this will mean working toward a steady-state economy at a sustainable (smaller than present) scale relative to the containing ecosystem that is finite and already overstressed. Since growth now makes us poorer, not richer, poverty reduction will require sharing in the present, not the empty promise of growth in the future.

Last week European leaders met in Brussels and, like sophomores cramming before a final, pulled an all-nighter. Their exam was a real-world project: restore investor confidence in the Eurozone. A lot of pressure was put on David Cameron to bring the UK into the new agreement; he was adamant in his refusal. Even without the UK, the measures that the Eurozone nations have announced may restore investor confidence, but one thing is certain: they shouldn’t, because they’ll fail miserably at staving off future financial crisis.

That’s because “restoring investor confidence” and “fixing the broken system” are two very different goals.

If more investors were like Jeremy Grantham, who’s got a clear view of the origin of the financial crisis, the two would line up a lot better. But most investors, like all of the policy makers who met in Brussels, are working out of an old-fashioned and mistaken economic model. Restoring confidence in a system built on that model isn’t going to fix what’s wrong.

What, exactly, is wrong? The New York Times articulated the conventional thinking when it opined, a few days before the all-nighter in Brussels, that the root of the debt crisis is “lack of growth.” The first step toward success in solving any problem is to define it accurately, and the conventional diagnosis gets it wrong because it looks at just half the problem. A more complete diagnosis: Some of the European economies haven’t been able to grow fast enough to pay back the burden of debt that has been wagered on them.

This formulation lets us see the path to a sturdy solution: if we want to avoid crises of debt repudiation, we need to limit the total creation of debt, public and private, to the amount that we can reasonably expect to be paid back through economic growth.

But instead of solving the problem of recurrent (and increasingly painful) crises of debt repudiation by looking at the system as a whole, the policy makers who met in Brussels went after just the most recent and obvious symptom: government deficits and threatened government defaults by the weaker economies of the Eurozone. When deficits are created by sovereign governments — governments that have the power to print money to cover them — they’re inflationary, and inflation is one way that a system’s need for debt repudiation can be met. But within the Eurozone, the European Central Bank holds inflation in check, so the necessary and expected debt repudiation has to take a different form. It has come this time as Greece’s move to renegotiate bond liability under threat of default — holders of Greek government bonds will get fifty cents on the dollar, not the full amount they expect. The conventional view sees that and thinks, “if Greece didn’t run deficits it wouldn’t have to default.”

That’s true, but too limited to get at the root of the problem. What the conventional frame of analysis doesn’t foresee: If you let the burden of total debt grow unchecked, and if you control both inflation and governmental default by mandating balanced budgets, you’ll simply displace the pressure for debt repudiation to somewhere else in the system. It will come out as bankruptcies and foreclosures or other private defaults, as stock market crashes, as cuts in pension promises or wage contracts, as loss of paper assets or expected future income of any kind. We can’t forestall the next crisis of debt repudiation unless we rein in the total creation of debt.

The new EU plan would take a major step toward making the Eurozone monetary union into a fiscal union, with stronger centralized control of inflationary deficits. Under the new rules, Eurozone member nations will have to balance their budgets over the economic cycle (if they go into deficit in times of recession, they’ll have to run a surplus in times of growth) and submit their budgets to the European Commission for review and approval. Currently member nations face penalties if they run persistent deficits — penalties that Greece consciously chose to ignore rather than see its economy sink into unemployment and recession under the onslaught of cheap imports from countries running a surplus. The new plan would have Eurozone member nations suffer larger, automatic penalties if they don’t obey the budget-balancing rules.

That will control inflation and bond default as methods of debt repudiation by imposing austerity budgets on struggling Eurozone members. (There are no penalties for the countries, like Germany, that create the other half of the problem by running trade surpluses.) Governments will have to cut social services and regulatory enforcement — cuts that will be touted as the best way to restore growth, and which will work to the benefit of the 1%. The rich get richer and government gets smaller — just what neocons and moneyed interests like to see.

As plenty of commentators have noticed, fiscal integration under the new budget rules and procedures means a loss of national sovereignty within the Eurozone. As only some of those commentators have cautioned, this makes government in Europe less democratic and less responsive to citizen concerns. “No problem,” say bankers and financiers. Democratically empowered citizens are likely to demand the level of governmental services and environmental protection that well-to-do nations are expected to provide — and those are luxuries their country can’t afford, not if it’s to grow rapidly enough to pay back the burden of debt it labors under.

The movement toward fiscal union and budget austerity thus represents the victory of growth-for-the-sake-of-growth over democracy-for-the-sake-of-democracy.

On an infinite planet, the two need not be at odds, and in fact can be seen to support each other. They certainly seemed to track together through much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as market economies expanded into an underdeveloped world. But in a world built out to the limits of what ecosystems can handle, it becomes increasingly obvious that there’s a tradeoff.

As should be obvious to policy makers, the expansionary phase of human economic history is over. It is no longer possible to have both democracy and robust, footprint-expanding growth. The freewheeling creation of debt, whether public or private, drives the latter. To preserve it as a very profitable feature of the economy, bankers and financiers are perfectly willing to sacrifice the former. That’s the deep and troubling lesson of the European Debt Crisis: today, the largest threat to democratic forms of government is the fact that the planet hosts a human debt-creation system suited for perpetual growth on an infinite planet.

Because an economy deals in physical reality — that is, it runs on matter and energy drawn from a finite planet — it is impossible for economic production to grow infinitely. Debt, being entirely imaginary, can grow however rapidly we choose to let it. A crisis of debt repudiation is the unavoidable result of a mismatch between the two. The conventional frame does not admit this, and it leads us straight toward regressive and destructive policies, including the elimination of environmental and social safeguards. Those safeguards set limits to what we let ourselves do in pursuit of economic growth, and thereby give us a higher standard of living by protecting us from environmental harms and economic insecurity.

Since a higher standard of living, and not growth for its own sake, is the ultimate purpose of the economy, it makes sense to allow for the possibility that the solution to our system’s regular crises of debt repudiation lies in controlling the creation of debt. The alternative — demanding more and more economic growth, ever larger throughput of matter and energy — is impossible to sustain on a finite planet.

Even in the short run, the infinite growth model is counterproductive. It leads to a declining standard of living and a loss of democratic freedom for the majority of the world’s population — Americans no less than Greeks, Italians and other Europeans. It does so because whether we’re prepared to admit it or not, we’ve reached the limits to growth. More often than not, further growth in GDP is uneconomic growth, because it costs us more in lost ecosystem services and other “disamenities” than we get in benefits.

Pro-growth people don’t see it that way, of course, no doubt because many of them are the ones who receive those benefits by imposing losses on the rest of us. Many of those losses emanate from, and aren’t fully contained within, the rapidly developing nations of China and India — countries whose leaders have mistakenly accepted a demonstrably flawed element of neoclassical thinking, the Environmental Kuznets Curve. This is the idea, much beloved of pro-growth advocates and members of the 1% everywhere, that environmental quality is a luxury that nations will be able to afford only after they develop more — which they can do by cashing out their natural capital for sale on world markets, and by hosting “sink” services, poisoning their land and mortgaging their future by absorbing the global economy’s waste stream.

The ecological footprint of the global economy is currently larger than the globe it inhabits. But you don’t have to believe that we’ve reached the limits to growth in order to see that the basic problem behind the European Debt Crisis is the mismatch between our rate of debt creation and the rate at which we can grow real wealth in order to pay that debt off.

How much can real wealth grow under reasonable environmental safeguards and with reasonable protection of worker (and citizen) health and safety? The answer is, in part, empirical. The non-empirical part has to do with those environmental and health and safety standards: what counts as “reasonable”? Opinions will differ, but only an out-and-out infinite planet theorist can argue that environmental constraints need to be lessened, and only an unreconstructed robber baron could argue that workers ought to be free — “free” — to starve or take on employment that could kill them.

Here’s how to begin to fix the broken system: Agree to minimum standards for environmental and health and safety regulation, such as those promulgated by the UN; find the sustainable rate of economic activity that’s possible within those limits; and limit the growth in debt — all debt, public and private — to what’s needed to support that activity. With such a fix, the human standard of living would be raised not though footprint- expanding growth, but through technological innovation that allows us to achieve more benefit from a constant, sustainably sized throughput.

If more investors understood that the excessive creation of debt in all its forms — not just government deficits — is the driver of our crises of debt repudiation, this reining in of the creation of debt would be the only way to restore their confidence.

Educating investors and policymakers about the economic and financial realities of a finite planet is a huge task, but eventually they’ll come around. They’ll have to. The planet is, after all, finite, and it’s going to keep offering the lesson until everybody gets it.

Regarding Your Modest Proposal for Preventing Canada from Remaining Cold

Dear Minister Kent,

On December 12, from the foyer of the Canadian House of Commons, you irrationally rationalized why it is a good idea for Canada to pull out of the Kyoto Protocol. I would like to congratulate you on your cheeky display of hyperbolic satire — there was so much cognitive dissonance and misleading rhetoric in your statement that it couldn’t possibly have been serious! I can’t wait for the day when you reveal that your government’s position is one big elaborate hoax designed to taunt the world into acting on climate change. I want to point out where your satire was effective but also give you a little bit of advice on how you could have made your statement even better.

First of all, you could have come right out and given the “real” reason why the “Harper Government” (TM) is getting out of Kyoto: because global warming is in Canada’s national interest! Developing the tar sands and pumping out greenhouse gasses to the max has the obvious benefit of improving Canada’s national temperature.

We all know that international forums are talk-fests that amount to non-binding statements of procrastination, but I laughed out loud when you pretended not to understand the symbolic value of forums like Kyoto and Durban. This rings especially true for a government that has proven its media savvy by virtue of authoritarian-style message control. Indeed, Kyoto has become a misplaced symbol of climate justice. But standing before a global audience and shamelessly teasing the world with such irresponsible nonsense! Priceless!

You were pretty convincing each time you conjectured that it is possible to create “jobs and growth” while also reducing emissions. Surely someone of your intellect and stature knows that at no time in history have we had economic “growth” without a corresponding increase in greenhouse gas emissions. Certainly not when the figures are adjusted to track the export of pollution at the planetary level. Development, maybe, but not growth! Man, I have to tell you, the joke became more cruel each time you repeated it (which happened a lot). Use it sparingly next time.

Your goal to reduce emissions via a “legally binding agreement to address global emissions that allows us to continue creating jobs and economic growth in Canada” hints at how elaborate the government’s hoax must be. At present, the Canadian government is shaping an economic agenda where more and more “growth” is coming from unsustainable oil production, natural resource extraction, and real estate inflation. No sane person thinks this is a good trajectory for the planet. Talk about wanting it both ways! Must be Christmas (well not quite, but almost — a few more sleeps!!). The world will be so shocked when you reveal the truth — about the Canadian position, I mean (not about Christmas).

Speaking of Christmas, I had an idea when I saw you pretend to stand up to big emitters like China and India. Way to goad them into action, by the way. But you know what would have been even better? Declaring that you are “standing up to preserve the Canadian holiday tradition of consuming an excess of cheaply manufactured Asian goods.” Then, when emissions go up in Asia as a result, you can stomp and huff that it’s “all their fault.” You missed a few opportunities like this to set yourself up for future satirical tantrums.

There were a couple of moments when your sense of humour went a little too far. Like when you repeated the government’s nonsensical target for emissions. The promise that you will focus on “reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 17 per cent over 2005 levels by 2020″ — effectively doing less than the previous government and pretending that it will save us from climate disaster — that’s so funny it hurts (my children). You can’t keep that joke up forever. But I double over with laughter each time you say your target is somehow the previous liberal government’s fault. Those genetically incompetent liberals!

It was cute how you pretended that “Canada’s position” is shaping a global consensus among the “EU… the United States, Australia, New Zealand, [the] least developed countries and the group of 43 small island states.” Cute, because Australia’s Minister for Climate Change implied they were leading the way by instituting a carbon tax, and don’t tell me that you’ve changed your “position” on that one! That would ruin the hoax! Beyond that, judging from how irked tiny Tuvalu was about your statement, you must have known that you were pushing a few buttons. Ian Fry, Tuvalu’s lead negotiator at Durban, said that “it’s an act of sabotage on our future.” Seriously, though. Tuvalu? Who knew that was even a country, right? ;)

Just when I thought you were going too far, you made a point so absurd that it reassured me of your comedy genius. The pièce de résistance was when you quipped that Kyoto would require Canadians to remove “every car, truck, ATV, tractor, ambulance, police car and vehicle of every kind from Canadian roads; or, closing down the entire farming and agricultural sector and cutting heat to every home, office, hospital, factory and building in Canada.” Well light my hyperbolic pants on fire and sound the alarm. Sure it would… if we choose exclusively to develop the tar sands instead! You’re such a drama queen. I’m glad you know Canadians aren’t stupid enough to believe such misleading statistical play. Who could ever dream of taking their ATV off the off-road anyway!?

And finally, regarding your plea at the end for “an agreement that works” for jobs …and growth …in Canada …and China …and Tuvalu …and for emissions reduction. Frankly, it was getting a little convoluted. Next time you should just let out a loud fart in front of the press, apologize for the emissions and then, in a fit of despair declare “what’s the point!? By the time global warming starts wreaking havoc, I’ll either be out of government or dead. What a waste of time. Stupid liberals.” Boy would that ever ignite a global response!

Anyway, you’re cutting it pretty close. It’s just about too late to stop runaway climate change and it’s making us all very nervous.You’re going to have to reveal your true position pretty soon and stop taunting us with these clever hijinks.

In the meantime, I’m looking forward to seeing more of this precious, mind-bending stuff. And soon. It’s truly a joy to watch.

Could President Obama be the one who leads Americans to recognize the ever-growing conflict between GDP and the health of the nation? Could Obama be the first to hearken the steady state economy — stabilized levels of production and consumption — as the sustainable alternative? Could Obama be the “steady-state president” we’ve all (well not all, but many of us) been waiting for?

Alas, probably not. The time is not quite ripe enough. Yet it is not quite out of the question, either. Obama shows clear signs of steady statesmanship, and citizens show signs of wanting it.

In “Obama’s New Square Deal,” Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne Jr. described how “President Obama has decided that he is more likely to win if the election is about big things rather than small ones. He hopes to turn the 2012 campaign from a plebiscite about the current state of the economy into a referendum about the broader progressive tradition that made us a middle-class nation. For the second time, he intends to stake his fate on a battle for the future.”

That’s exactly the type of leadership needed to advance the steady state economy as a policy goal with widespread public support. In particular, we need a focus on “big things,” such as the long-run sustainability of the American and global economies. We need a president who will “battle for the future,” not for another percentage point in next year’s GDP growth.

The progressive tradition Dionne sees Obama adhering to is also conducive to the steady state economy, which is roughly indicated by stabilized GDP and a stable standard of living. Dionne rightly points to Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt as primary purveyors of the progressive movement, and sees signs that Obama could channel the Roosevelts into a 21st century New Deal for the middle class. TR and FDR were concerned with the middle class, for sure, but they were concerned with much more as well. They were concerned with truly “big things” such as the long-run sustainability of the nation.

Theodore Roosevelt was the father of the American conservation estate, establishing national forests and parks left and right, as well as establishing the first national wildlife refuge at Pelican Island, Florida in 1903. This original icon of the Republican Party would be seen as an iconoclast today, as the Grand Old Party is the last in line to protect our great natural heritage. “Drill baby drill” is the iconic rhetoric of today’s Republicans. TR made an early escape from Big Money with his Bull Moose Party.

Meanwhile, FDR was the leader in establishing the broad sweep of progressive, professional natural resources agencies and programs we have today. The Soil Conservation Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, and Bureau of Land Management, among many others, were brainchildren of Roosevelt and his savvy secretaries of Agriculture and Interior. FDR and his Cabinet knew all about trade-offs, sacrifice, and “opportunity costs.” They knew you couldn’t have your cake and eat it too. They knew well the trade-off between economic growth and environmental protection. By contrast, today’s Democrats are more likely to muddy the conservation waters with the rhetoric that “there is no conflict between growing the economy and protecting the environment.”

But that brings us back to Obama. He is an exception, at least by today’s standards. He is a throwback to the heyday of smart, progressive politics. He doesn’t insult our intelligence with win-win rhetoric. In fact, Obama hardly even uttered the phrase “economic growth” until the recession made it politically impossible not to. He knows we need a paradigm shift in economic thinking and that sustainability is the watchword for the 21st century.

So perhaps the recession has Obama biding his time, waiting until the coast is clear enough for steady statesmanship. He needs some cover, political cover, in order to talk truthfully about the trade-off between economic growth and environmental protection, economic sustainability, and national security. He needs academics, think tanks, bureaucrats, and a growing base of citizens, national and global, to describe the trade-off between economic growth and national wellbeing.

Otherwise, how can we expect Obama to be the first steady-state president?

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas,
Everywhere you go.
Take a look in the storage hut,
Where doors roll open and shut,
And piles of pap and useless crap do grow.

It’s hard to know where to begin a rant about the materialistic mess that our culture has made of Christmastime in the United States. An easy target is the Thanksgiving midnight-madness sales at big-box retail stores. And there’s always those devious marketers who use nostalgia to turn December into a month of mass consumption. But there’s one industry that, more than any other, epitomizes materialism and our seemingly limitless propensity to consume: self storage.

Self-storage businesses are warehouses where people rent garages to hold their excess stuff. In the not-too-distant past, a small number of self-storage businesses catered to homes in transition (for example, when people were moving from one place to another). On the pop culture scene, if self storage made any appearance at all, it was in a macabre role. For instance, in the film The Silence of the Lambs, Clarice Starling searches a storage unit and finds a pickled head in a jar.

Oh how things have changed! Over the past few decades self-storage facilities have popped up faster than Starbucks outlets. The U.S. has over 2.2 billion square feet (78 square miles) of rentable space, more than 3 times the size of Manhattan Island.[1] One out of every 10 American households now leases a unit.[2]

What’s going on here? Two separate currents have come together to form a riptide that drags people under the sea of self storage. The first current is the credit-card-fueled shopping frenzy that has put many Americans in a position of owning too many possessions. The second current is the promotion of self storage as an investment opportunity for entrepreneurs. The first current is pretty well documented,[3] so let’s float along with the second current for a bit.

The place to get started is a bookstore or your local library. There you might be able to find How to Invest in Self-Storage by Scott Duffy and R. K. Kliebenstein (2005), Self-Storage Investments by Richard Stephens (2008), or Rent It Up! Four Steps to Unlocking the Profit Potential in Your Self-Storage Business by Tron Jordheim (2009). Of if you prefer fiction to how-to books, there’s even a novel titled Self Storage (2008) by Gayle Brandeis.

Here’s a quote from the opening of Rent It Up!:

But if you are trying to create as much profit as you can and build a sustainable business, as well as a real estate asset that will increase in value far faster than your competitors’, then you are in the right place and should keep on reading.”

Maybe a row of self-storage units could hold all the books about self storage.

It’s not that easy to define the word “sustainable,” but one wonders what meaning the author ascribes to this term when he refers to building a sustainable self-storage business.

One thing’s certain about sustainability: it doesn’t result from continuous exponential growth. The Self Storage Association (SSA), the trade organization and lobbying arm of the industry, reports that self storage is a $20 billion industry. It has been the “fastest growing segment of the commercial real estate industry over the last 30 years and has been considered by Wall Street analysts to be recession resistant based on its performance since the economic recession of September, 2008.”[4] What has made the industry recession-proof? One answer is that foreclosures encourage the newly homeless to move their stuff into temporary storage. In the age of uneconomic growth, when overall growth is making the U.S. poorer rather than richer, the self-storage industry appears to be an uneconomic leader.

Not everyone has the means to start a self-storage business, but would-be entrepreneurs have another way to get in the game. A cottage industry has developed around auctions from failures in self storage. When a tenant fails to make payments on a self-storage rental, the storage company can auction off the contents of the unit. Another trip to the bookstore or library can catch you up on this trend. These books explain how to exploit such a circumstance: How to Make Boxes of Cash with Self-Storage Auctions by Barbara Rogers (2007), Making Money with Storage Auctions by Edwards Busoni (2008), Mini Storage Auctions: Uncover the Cash Within by L. S. James (2010), and Making Money A-Z with Self Storage Unit Auctions by Glendon Cameron (2011).

It’s a surprise that no one has written How to Make Money Writing and Selling Books about Self-Storage Auctions!

Moving from the unreal to the surreal… self storage has rebounded from its lowly pop-culture status in The Silence of the Lambs. The cable channel A&E broadcasts a program called Storage Wars about people competing for profits in self-storage auctions. A&E’s website says that Storage Wars, “which follows teams of bidders looking to score it big in the high stakes world of storage auctions, ranks as A&E’s number one series of all time among adults 25-54. During its first season, the series averaged 2.8 million viewers per episode and peaked at 3.8 million.”[5]

In the spirit of regaining a positive attitude during this holiday season, I’d like to propose a New Year’s resolution for the nation. Let’s ditch our storage units. It should be a snap for the third-most-popular type of self-storage customers: people storing items they no longer need or want.[6] And for other customers, downsizing can be downright liberating. This Christmas season, the best gift of all is the gift of less cluttered lives.

[1] Self Storage Association Fact Sheet.

[2] Jon Mooallem, “The Self-Storage Self,” New York Times Magazine, September 2, 2009.

[3] For more details see sources such as the Center for a New American Dream and the Story of Stuff Project.

[4] See note 1.

[5] A&E.

[6] See note 2.