Whatcom County belongs to the Cascadia Bioregion, defined by its water systems and topography, but also its varied culture. (Steven Pavlov, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Many counties are locally committed to sustainability. They have plans and policies to meet their commitments. But sustainability issues are not confined within county borders. Counties are human constructs, and although government jurisdiction runs to the county line, ecosystems extend beyond it. And so does the local economy, as people cross borders to work and shop. Like a cell in a body, a county is dependent on the integrity of its host system—the bioregion, and ultimately, the biosphere.

We exist in a living, interconnected web of ecological and social relationships. Local political boundaries are important, as they enable governments to enact codes and ordinances and citizens to affect policy. But, for communities to achieve self-sufficiency and resilience, they must look beyond political boundaries.

A bioregional approach to sustainability is informed by ecological living systems and cultural connections. At the forefront of this growing movement, which can be traced back to the ‘70s, are Regenerate Whatcom and its parent network, Regenerate Cascadia.

Growth Weighs on Whatcom

Whatcom County, located in northwest Washington State, runs along the border with British Columbia, Canada. The county’s seat and largest city, with a population of 99,000, is Bellingham. Whatcom County suffers from past industrial abuse and contamination. Furthermore, expanding populations from Seattle to the south and Vancouver to the north are placing growth pressures on the county. The government is planning for 30 percent more people by mid-century.

Much of Whatcom County is located within the Nooksak River Watershed (shaded in pink). (Regenerate Cascadia presentation)

Pollution and economic growth are already straining the region’s freshwater supply and public infrastructure. The former depends on glacial melt that is disappearing due to climate change. But certain sectors are viewing the increasingly unsustainable situation as an investment opportunity. And local officials have generally aligned themselves with this mindset.

Meanwhile, residents subsidize the growth boom with their taxes, and few partake of the benefits. The increasingly popular bioregional model offers an offramp from the prevailing growth-centric mindset.

Whatcom’s Bioregionalism Beginnings

David MacLeod has a long history working on sustainability in Whatcom County. He and his collaborators, such as fellow Whatcom County resident Brian Kerkvliet, helped found several organizations. These include Sustainable Bellingham, Transition Whatcom, and Salish Seed Guild. In 2023, MacLeod et al. activated Regenerate Whatcom with the Regenerate Cascadia Activation Tour. After over a year of quiet organizing, they announced the group’s launch in an article for Whatcom Watch.

While the Whatcom County Council plans to “accommodate growth,” the local bioregionalism movement invites them to take a different approach. (Whatcom County)

True to the philosophy of bioregionalism, Regenerate Whatcom and the larger Regenerate Cascadia draw heavily on systems thinking. As MacLeod describes it, changing a system requires finding its leverage points. Instead of treating isolated symptoms—combatting water pollution with chemical filters or addressing food insecurity solely with food banks—these groups seek to redesign the system itself. By weaving together community-led watershed governance, regenerative agricultural practices, and permaculture principles, Regenerate Whatcom and Cascadia aim to create self-healing landscapes and resilient local economies.

As Brian Kerkvliet explained in an interview for the Herald, “In permaculture, it’s not about each element. It’s about the relationships between the elements. And is that a positive relationship or a negative relationship or a so-so relationship? And how do we get more positive relationships going and building a web that is resilient and moves—­­steers the ship in the right direction.” As an alternative to the typical model of community development, the Whatcom experiment in bioregional permaculture offers a path off the growth conveyor.

Inspired originally by the history of indigenous stewardship in the region, bioregionalism has a long lineage in the Pacific Northwest. Peter Berg and Raymond Dasmann of Planet Drum further developed the philosophy in the 1970s. In 1986, the first Cascadia Bioregional Congress was held at Evergreen State College.

The current manifestation of Regenerate Cascadia was officially founded in 2023 by Brandon Letsinger and Clare Attwell. It emerged from a partnership between the Cascadia Department of Bioregion, the Design School for Regenerating Earth, and the Regenerative Communities Network.

MacLeod and his Whatcom County colleagues found a natural fit within Regenerate Cascadia for their own work on local sustainability. Chief among their concerns are ecological overshoot and limits to growth. MacLeod contends that the way forward involves challenging growth and building an alternative path to meet human needs.

Bioregional Mapping

In an interview for the Herald, Brandon Letsinger, the Executive Director of Regenerate Cascadia, emphasized the importance of using layered mapping to understand the bioregion. Since water is vital to any community, watersheds are a priority for this mapping. Geophysical layers, such as soil type and topography, and biotic layers, such as plant and animal communities, are also useful. But it is the human layers of cultural connections that set the bioregional approach to mapping apart. Brian Kerkvliet refers to these connections as formerly “invisible layers” made visible through mapping exercises.

Regenerate Whatcom established a broad base of partners to collaboratively catalyze local change. (Regenerate Cascadia presentation)

As part of the mapping process, Regenerate Whatcom welcomes participants from numerous backgrounds and groups to mark up a map of the “water catchment.” That’s Kerkvliet’s preferred alternative to “watershed,” meant to prompt thinking about preserving water, not “shedding” it.

During these community mapping sessions, participants indicate areas that are precious—that need preserving. They also point out areas that have been degraded and need restoring or repairing, as well as places where people are thriving. This community analysis results in a layered map, and the process continues, with invitations extended to those who weren’t present at previous sessions.

Healing Community Fissures

Bioregionalist thinkers emphasize that bioregional mapping facilitates what is missing from many grassroots attempts at change: cultural connections that bind individuals and communities to a common cause. Certain actors—for instance, developers—use government meetings to exert their influence. But they are hardly representative of the community at large; they have narrow interests in converting land and extracting resources for profit. Yet they are adept at using conventional mapping and social organizing to their benefit. And they usually have more money to throw at the task than do grassroots organizations that better represent the community.

As described by Attwell, Letsinger, and Taya Seidler:

Many grassroots efforts operate in isolation, limited by a lack of resources, training, and support. Inadequate governance tools, volunteer burnout, funding scarcity, and a breakdown in trust often prevent collaboration and long-term impact. Without confronting these structural issues, even the most well-intentioned initiatives will struggle to sustain meaningful change.

Connecting with people and place can take many forms. (Ted Tarricone)

At a fundamental level, bioregionalism is meant to repair the fragmentation that afflicts modern society. According to its proponents, such fragmentation has left people prone to a consumerist and growth-centric worldview, sold as a replacement for connection with nature and each other. As an ethos designed to heal these fissures and restore connections to place and community, bioregionalism is about “living in place.” It invites people to find connections to place and community and understand that they are nested within layers of relationships.

And when it comes to challenging the growth imperative at the local level, bioregionalism provides a countervailing cultural and civic space with potential to establish a local steady state economy. As an explicit, tangible expression of a community’s human-nature connection, bioregional mapping provides an alternative vision to conventional development plans. This helps citizens operationalize their sustainable development goals.

Funding Regeneration

Regenerate Cascadia’s philanthropic funding base comes from donor-advised funds (DAFs), which are accounts designated for charitable giving. The parent group then funds Regenerate Whatcom and other Landscape Groups through a program called Cascadia BioFi. This program’s mission is to build “the financial ecosystems that resource community-led regeneration.”

Cascadia BioFi’s principal means of providing capital is “flow funding,” by which landscape groups—rather than Regenerate Cascadia—“allocate grants directly to projects and people in their networks.” This trust-based model flips traditional, hierarchical grantmaking on its head, placing decision-making power in the hands of locals who deeply understand the community’s needs. This ensures resources are directed where they will have the greatest impact.

In Cascadia BioFi’s flow funding model, local landscape groups decide how to allocate funds. (Regenerate Whatcom Initiating Team)

According to Letsinger, the bioregional model “taps into a social fabric that already exists.” “We identified this missing layer of coordination. Then, we were able to flow funds and extend resources to those people in the communities who can help connect things together.”

MacLeod added that flow funding empowers landscape groups without bureaucratic baggage. He described how groups have “acupressure points” that are particularly effective in building community, and how large, outside grantmaking institutions aren’t familiar with those points. But with assistance from the parent group comes responsibility and reciprocation. “We talk about moving at the speed of trust,” MacLeod said.

Gaya Herrington is the finance co-director for Cascadia BioFi. An econometrician by training, she made waves by affirming that we are on the overshoot path predicted in the classic Limits to Growth analysis from the 1970s.

Herrington gave a keynote presentation at the 13th Biennial United States Society for Ecological Economics Conference in June 2026, embracing a limits approach to economic activity. Her address focused on a well-being economy, in which bioregionalism plays a fundamental role. She spoke of transitioning from the insane growth-centric mindset, to one of “human and ecological well-being.” At the conference, Herrington also joined the list of notable signatories to CASSE’s position statement on economic growth.

Holding the Line on Growth

Reliance on local ecosystems, to the greatest extent possible, is a key component of most steady-state visions. Although this is difficult to achieve at the county scale, it is more easily envisioned within a region that can produce a diversity of goods and services. But it’s not enough to produce goods and services to meet physical needs. Strong social networks are a prerequisite to self-reliance and well-being. By centering social networks and ecosystem health, including soil and water quality, as the measure of success, bioregionalism provides an alternative to GDP.

Unfortunately, Whatcom County’s guiding document—their newly finalized comprehensive plan—remains growth-centric. It doesn’t reflect the bioregional movement burgeoning within and around the county. Although the comprehensive plan limits growth to “urban growth areas” on the peripheries of various municipalities, it lists “accommodating growth” as a goal. There is no mention of carrying capacity for the county or the region. Indeed, the Long Range Planning Division for Whatcom County states, on their website:

[The Division] is dedicated to fostering sustainable growth and development by preparing for the county’s future needs. This proactive approach involves analyzing current trends, engaging with community stakeholders, and developing comprehensive plans that reflect the vision and goals of local residents.

As he helps shape Regenerate Whatcom’s work, David MacLeod recognizes the need for directly amending county and regional plans to challenge the growth mindset. Already, area residents have defeated planned expansions of municipalities. For example, the City of Blaine voted to “de-annex” an adjacent 573 acres.

One of Regenerate Whatcom’s multitude of community gatherings: an urban garden tour. (Ted Tarricone)

Regenerate Whatcom is making efforts to engage local policymakers. A recent mapping event had a Public Utility District board member, Atul Deshmane, in attendance. The organizers also invited port commissioners, who were unable to attend, and will continue to extend invitations to officials. MacLeod thinks measures of local human impacts, such as ecological footprint—which CASSE is calculating via the Keep Our Counties Great program—will grab policymakers’ attention. Such analyses emphasize the importance of a steady-state county vision.

MacLeod believes that, beyond analyses and mapping, alternative models for living and interacting with and regenerating the landscape are a necessary first step to policy change. In his view, laying the groundwork for a parallel path for living, and building community to shape and begin walking that path, are the means for challenging growth. With their bioregional approach to sustainability, Regenerate Whatcom and Regenerate Cascadia are trailblazing that path.

Dave Rollo is a policy specialist and team leader of the Keep Our Counties Great campaign at CASSE.

The post Bioregional Regeneration: Whatcom County and Cascadia appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

Individual sustainability is not collective sustainability. (Chemineau from Lamb WF et al. 2020)

Sustainability has become a buzzword used to shame or praise without reliably accounting for environmental impacts. Advertisers have co-opted the word in pop culture to persuade consumers to buy products that are “better” for the environment. This hides that buying so-called sustainable products still depletes Earth’s resources. It also places responsibility for climate action on individuals, while collective sustainability is underemphasized.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines sustainable as “capable of being sustained” and lists “sustainable growth” as the first example. This is contradictory, because it assumes infinite expansion can be sustainable on a finite planet.

Only in the second definition does the dictionary highlight the environment: “of, relating to, or being a method of harvesting or using a resource so that the resource is not depleted or permanently damaged.” Let’s proceed with this definition, which makes it clear that environmental resources are not infinite.

If we start with the understanding that quantity is the key factor, then sustainability means consuming less rather than consuming differently. However, questions and debates remain about how to measure sustainability and how to frame the results to incite the change needed to reach a steady state.

Measuring Sustainability

One way to quantify sustainability is to measure resource use and compare it with available resources. The ecological footprint is a measure of the area required to support economic activity, while biocapacity is a measure of the area available to support it. This accounting framework includes land area used to grow crops, produce forest products, graze livestock, and build infrastructure, as well as water area for fishing. The ecological footprint also includes the area of forested land necessary for carbon sequestration.

This framework does not encompass all measurable environmental impacts relevant to sustainability, such as emissions from other greenhouse gases and chemical pollution. Yet it is one of the few quantifiable frameworks that aggregates economic activity and links it to environmental impact.

Earth Overshoot Day arrives sooner and sooner each year. (Global Footprint Network)

When an ecological footprint exceeds biocapacity, researchers call this ecological overshoot. The Global Footprint Network, a U.S.-based nonprofit, uses these data to determine the day humanity exceeds the resources that can be regenerated within that year. This is called Earth Overshoot Day. It is a simple way to frame sustainability: resources used compared to resources regenerated within a year.

This total planetary framing of ecological footprint versus biocapacity puts all of humanity on equal footing. We’re consuming more than Earth can sustain. But there’s infinite nuance behind the “we” and the “Earth” in that statement. How do we allocate human responsibility, recognizing Earth’s biocapacity is unevenly distributed?

Totals Versus Averages

Who’s the most sustainable and who’s the most responsible for change? The answer depends on whether you frame consumption as a total or an average. Globally, the ecological footprint amounted to 20.5 billion global hectares (gha), or roughly 2.5 gha per person in 2025. This far exceeds global biocapacity, which was 12 billion gha, or 1.48 gha per person.

In 2025, only one country topped both lists. (Ecological Footprint Initiative)

A country’s relative sustainability depends on perspective. The top five countries by total ecological footprint differ from the top five by per capita ecological footprint.

In 2025, China had the largest total footprint (five billion gha), yet China ranked 36^th in ecological footprint per capita. The Faroe Islands have the highest ecological footprint per capita, but a relatively minuscule total ecological footprint. The United States is the only country in the top five for total and per capita ecological footprint.

These two ways of framing sustainability offer distinct perspectives, and both are worth considering. Per capita ecological footprints highlight the responsibility of high-income countries, where the average individual consumes far more of Earth’s resources than the average global citizen. For instance, the U.S. ecological footprint per capita (7.05 gha) is more than twice the world average.

Total ecological footprints shift the focus from individual responsibility to collective responsibility and systemic government action. Both perspectives matter on the path to a steady state economy. Intentionally omitting one perspective can distort the message. But total versus average isn’t the only factor to consider.

Is the Goal National Self-Sufficiency?

Another, less obvious framing decision when using this accounting framework concerns how you compare ecological footprint and biocapacity. The most common comparison is between a country’s national ecological footprint and biocapacity within its borders. The Global Footprint Network uses this approach. They label countries as “creditors” or “debtors” depending on whether a country’s biocapacity exceeds its ecological footprint or vice versa.

Although it is a helpful communicative tool, this should not be the sole basis for assessing national sustainability. Arguably the most important reason for this is that we all share the same Earth, and a biocapacity surplus in one country can be used to help another country. Some countries, such as Canada, have a biocapacity surplus yet maintain a disproportionately high ecological footprint per capita. And most countries—even those with a biocapacity surplus—are not self-sufficient, relying on international trade to meet economic demands.

An alternative framework proposed by a researcher in the Czech Republic is what he calls sustainability quadrants. He compares national biocapacity to national ecological footprint, which he calls local ecological balance, and world biocapacity to national ecological footprint, which he calls global ecological balance. Countries fall into a quadrant based on their local and global ecological balance, calculated using per capita values.

Graph modified from Syrovátka (2020) using 2025 data with different-colored points showing World Bank income groupings in 2026. Values are in global hectares per capita. (National Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts)

Dr. Miroslav Syrovátka conducted his research using 2018 data. I replicated it with the most recent, 2025, data in the National Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts, which cover 209 countries. Researchers at the Ecological Footprint Initiative produced these data.

Quadrant one (Q1) is fully sustainable, quadrants two (Q2) and four (Q4) are partially sustainable, and quadrant three (Q3) is unsustainable. In a truly sustainable world, all countries would be in quadrant one, achieving both local and global ecological balance.

No countries are sustainable (Q1), 58 are partially sustainable (Q2 and Q4), and 151 are unsustainable (Q3). Arbitrary borders and biophysical realities make it difficult for some countries to achieve local ecological balance. Yet several countries fall in Q4 (local ecological balance), including almost all low-income countries. This framework offers a meaningful interpretation of sustainability because it incorporates environmental impact at the national and planetary levels.

Which Side of the Footprint Coin?

The ecological footprint framework offers more than one way to measure economic activity. All ecological footprint values presented up to this point have been consumption-based. But this is only one side of the coin; there are also production footprint data.

The ecological footprint of consumption is the area needed to harvest resources and absorb waste for all domestic and imported goods, minus exports. By contrast, the ecological footprint of production excludes imports and includes exports.

At the global scale, the ecological footprint of production equals that of consumption. However, at the national level, production and consumption footprints can paint different pictures. This is especially true for countries that rely heavily on international trade. In the words of Syrovátka, “Consumption may be the driving force, but what physically depletes domestic resources is domestic primary production.” From a policy standpoint, regulating industrial harvesting or waste is easier for governments than controlling consumption.

Table modified from Syrovátka (2020) using both production and consumption ecological footprints for 2025. (National Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts)

I also applied the sustainability quadrant approach to the production ecological footprint, covering 210 countries in 2025. Variability among countries is much greater for the production measure. Some countries appear in Q1, the sustainable quadrant. This indicates that 25 countries’ domestic production is ecologically balanced locally and globally. But they rely on footprint-intensive imports to support national consumption.

How Does International Trade Fit In?

Whether a country imports or exports many footprint-intensive goods changes which quadrant it falls in. Let’s examine a country dependent on exports, making it partially sustainable consumption-wise but unsustainable in production: New Zealand.

From a consumption perspective, the South Pacific Island has a local ecological balance of 3.8 gha/capita and a global ecological balance of -4.4 gha/capita. However, New Zealand’s economy relies on agriculture, forestry, and fisheries. It is the top global exporter of sheep meat and dairy. Therefore, the country’s production ecological footprint is in the unsustainable (Q3) quadrant, with a local ecological balance of -1.7 gha/capita and a global ecological balance of -8.4 gha/capita. Framing ecological footprint based on consumption versus production changes the story about sustainability in New Zealand.

Sheep graze near the ocean in Coromandel, New Zealand. (Petra Reid, Pexels)

Countries cannot halt all international trade, and many small and island nations rely on it to sustain their populations. But trade matters when evaluating sustainability. Green-growth advocates promote international trade to expand environmental technologies and grow economies so countries can better manage environmental challenges. This is controversial, because there is no evidence of absolute decoupling between economic growth and environmental impact.

Alternatively, degrowth advocates support reducing long-distance trade, introducing export quotas, and shortening supply chains. Similarly, the Sustainable Trade Act, based on steady-state principles, doesn’t allow any trade that jeopardizes important environmental and labor protections. It sets international trade targets tied to U.S. GDP, with a goal of separating trade from U.S. prosperity.

Such policies would reduce the natural resource depletion and pollution associated with trade, contributing to a sustainable, steady-state future. As countries introduce policy changes, researchers can utilize the sustainability-quadrants framework to assess whether they are progressing toward sustainability.

It’s All About Framing

Activists push back on the sustainability label. (Mike Langridge)

Sustainability is often used as a buzzword to benefit greenwashing companies and shame individuals for decisions not within their control. A transition toward a steady state will require people to be skeptical of the sustainability label and examine the assumptions behind it.

One way to assess sustainability that doesn’t feed into “green” consumerism is to compare ecological footprint and biocapacity. But even this seemingly straightforward measurement of sustainability can be framed in myriad ways.

How indicators are framed reveals normative assumptions, whether the presenter acknowledges them or not. For instance, presenting only national ecological footprint totals, without population data, ignores the disproportionate over-consumption by people in high-income countries. Focusing solely on per capita footprints places the responsibility on consumers.

Comparing a country’s ecological footprint to its biocapacity, without considering global-average biocapacity, assumes countries should be self-sufficient. Analyzing the consumption ecological footprint without accounting for production clouds the story regarding international trade.

But the starting point for unpacking sustainability is acknowledging that quantity—how much we consume, of “green” products or otherwise—is the key. Many companies and governments ignore this. If we cannot alter how they define “sustainable,” we can become more aware of the assumptions behind it.

Peri Dworatzek is a senior research scientist at CASSE and a partnership coordinator at the International Ecological Footprint Learning Lab.

The post Unpacking the Concept of Sustainability appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

Especially in the last half-century, public and private pensions have attracted the attention of policymakers at the federal, state, and local level. (Social Security Administration)

Pension funds wield a great deal of power, controlling nearly a third of owned assets on Earth. However, ultimately that power is seldom used to serve the well-being of pensioners. It is deployed primarily to grow wealth, at almost any cost. While intended to benefit pensioners in their retirement years, this narrow focus leads to superfluous production and consumption and the further breaching of planetary boundaries.

By pursuing asset growth without considering the environmental consequences, pension funds are actually harming pensioners. They’re also harming countless beings who don’t participate in the pension system. This system has evolved from a holistic social contract to support the elderly into an industry chasing and funding economic growth. It reflects a society that values financial capital over natural, human, or social capital.

Reforming the pension system is a crucial step toward a steady state economy. If we don’t take that step soon, the real economy—built on natural resources—will no longer be able to provide even the financial capital we rely upon so heavily.

Pension Systems Morph

In 1875, American Express launched the first corporate-sponsored retirement program in the United States. Then, in 1889, German Chancelor Otto Van Bismark instituted the first public old-age social insurance program. Other companies, and some governments, soon followed suit.

In their early years, pensions were simply meant to supplement the income of people living past their years of productive labor. But as the private sector accumulated more wealth in the late 19^th century, the pension system became more prominent. This is partly because its managers developed professionalized accounting systems and strategic asset management. The potential of pension systems to accumulate wealth and incentivize economic growth quickly materialized.

In the early days of U.S. pensions, the risks fund managers were willing to take were limited by the “prudent investor rule.” This rule was established in 1830 by the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision in Harvard College & Massachusetts General Hospital v. Armory. The court obligated investment-fund managers to make decisions that “men of prudence” would make, in terms of returns and risk. For over a century, the prudent investor rule was assumed to apply to any and all investments.

But in the 1970s, a series of recessions, combined with corporate pension fraud, compelled policymakers and investors alike to consider new rules and investment strategies. In 1974, President Ford signed the landmark Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) into law.

When the South Bend, Indiana, Studebaker Automobile Company closed suddenly in 1963, thousands of workers lost their already contracted pensions. (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

ERISA forced a subtle and ironic change. Pension-fund managers were no longer expected to focus on the safety of any single investment. They were expected, instead, to exercise prudence only with regard to entire fund portfolios, which comprise a mix of equities and bonds determined by the fund manager. ERISA also established a new government fund that served as a failsafe for pensioners in the event of fraud or fund dissolution. This led to an even greater tolerance for risk associated with any single investment.

Free to invest in riskier assets, pension funds began to enter all asset class markets in the pursuit of growth. Commodities, venture capital, and private equity now comprise a significant portion of pension-fund assets.

Today, to maintain the headlong pursuit of growth, fund managers and regulators rationalize increased risk-taking. Diversified portfolios, they allege, more than adequately protect investor security. Some pension funds are even investing in cryptocurrencies.

Pension System Not Fit for Purpose

Pension-fund investments don’t create wealth out of thin air. Much of the monetary wealth in pension funds reflects expectations for future growth in the real economy. The anticipation of real growth and revenue—sometimes plausible, sometimes not—has become the footing for investment decisions.

However, companies do ultimately have to grow if they want to maintain their attractiveness to pension-fund managers. This dependence on constant growth creates three main challenges.

First, pension funds operate on a planet with finite resources, and that planet is the life support system of pensioners. With each passing year, the economic expansion we pursue in order to bolster our retirement assets actively degrades the future into which we will retire. What good is accumulating financial capital, if doing so destroys the natural capital we need to survive?

Current retirement-system investment, limited to the growth of financial capital that undermines other essential forms of capital, cannot persist. (Arketa Institute for Post-Growth Finance)

Secondly, many pension funds apply models suggesting that, even with +4°C to +7°C degrees of global warming, we can sustain economic growth. This is in shocking contrast to recent actuarial studies; though scientists haven’t agreed on a dollar amount, they agree climate change will cost the economy. But in the pension world, actuarial estimates are overwhelmed by what Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan once called “irrational exuberance.” This means that, at some point, reality will bite and financial markets will crash, likely at an unprecedented scale and degree of permanence.

Last of all, pension funds have focused on providing only financial capital after retirement, when our genuine capital needs are much broader. The social, human, and natural capital on which retirees depend cannot be ignored or cast aside. But increasingly, the cost of financial returns is the illness, poverty, and strained social networks of the systems’ intended beneficiaries. This has left many retirees underserved.

Thinking Beyond Financial Capital

Mindful of the diverse forms of capital and their contributions to genuine prosperity, we can reframe retirement-system priorities. Natural capital, in particular, must be valued and preserved if retirement means not just financial security, but also a livable environment and a sustainably high quality of life.

Post-growth retirement savings, dedicated to prosperous and stable retirement outcomes, require a much different allocation of community wealth. (Arketa Institute for Post-Growth Finance)

In order to better provide for us in our retirement years, pension fund managers (and society at large) must begin thinking about multi-capital returns. The returns we should optimize are for the kinds of value we really want (and need) to receive in retirement. Pension beneficiaries should see inherent value in such multi-capital returns.

Think of it this way: What good is money in a world on fire, stripped of biodiversity, engulfed in conflicts hot and cold, and left without any sense of community?

What would our world look like if our societies and pension funds aimed for a more balanced allocation of capital?

What Stands in the Way of Pension Progress?

There are barriers to implementing a sustainable, steady-state pension system. But, because pension funds are so large and influential, they have the resources to surmount these barriers. Fundamental change will require vision and determination—from the public and the government as much as from pension-fund managers.

Legal limitations and customs are probably the most significant barrier to overcome. As it stands, the law requires pension-fund managers—aka fiduciaries—to place their client’s “interests” before their own. The problem is that interests are defined narrowly as maximum financial returns. Fiduciaries can be sued if they invest in something that underperforms financially, even if it enhances other forms of capital that retirees need.

Herman Daly noted that “value could conceivably grow forever, but the physical mass in which value inheres must conform to a steady state.” And so it is with retirement funds.

Retirement-system beneficiaries are treated, accordingly, as passive shareholders, equipped to judge their fund managers only on financial returns. There is no legal distinction between maximum financial returns and optimum financial returns. Yet history and economic logic tell us there is often a wide gulf between the two.

The same laws and customs that present barriers to pension-system reform also impede corporate-governance reform. Contemporary courts have allowed the idea of “shareholder primacy” to guide how we define corporate responsibility and how we regulate corporations. This is despite the almost complete divergence between responsible corporate governance on one side and expected financial performance on the other. This perverse standard has spilled over onto pension-fund managers, judged as they are on the same “growth-first” corporate standard.

The Importance of Public Pensions

Ongoing attempts to institute various forms of “stakeholder” capitalism, social investing, and the designation of “B” corporations, have generated few notably positive changes. If anything, it has become more difficult to discern the distinction between true accounting for natural-capital degradation and deceptive “greenwashing.”

It may simply be too much to ask pension-fund managers to do the job themselves. Governments are better equipped to address many of the needs that financial markets can never address, adequately or sustainably. Modest pension goals could be met just as readily by an improved array of universal social supports as by any capital market-linked pension.

The realm of public pensions is already sweeping. Federal, state, and local governments have held on to traditional “defined benefit” pensions—not dependent on market returns—much more than corporations have. But they’ve succumbed to the growth imperative too, chasing maximum returns in the equities and bond markets.

Blue bars represent estimates from the Boston College Center for Retirement Research Data and red from the Federal Reserve. Including federal civilians and military personnel, public pensioners received over $600 billion in payments in 2025. (Public Plans Data, CC)

Adopting a pay-as-you-go pension model would force governments to build costs into their annual budgets, raising sufficient tax revenue to cover them. Public fund managers could invest any extra cash flow (likely modest) in very conservative investments, such as U.S. Treasury notes.

Standing in the way of these reforms, however, are significant political and social prejudices. The kind of transformative change society needs is unlikely to follow any regulatory reform focused narrowly on private pension fund managers.

Which brings us to another principal impediment: inertia. The change to a post-growth pension system represents a decisive shift in investment style. Given the challenges we’re facing, however, the choices before us should be increasingly easy to make.

Pensioners Hold Power

These barriers may seem like intractable impediments. But well-being and sustainability must trump financial accumulation and the status quo. The barriers have solidified over time and will take time to dissolve. The sooner we start, however, the more our pension system can live up to its promise and potential.

Politicians like Jacob Javits (R-NY) have spearheaded government protections for pensioners and pension-fund regulatory reform. (U.S. Department of Labor)

Cultures typically change slowly, often in undiscernible increments as new ways of thinking and best practices emerge. To speed up the process, pension beneficiaries must organize to support reform. They’ll need to focus resolutely on the multiple forms of capital, without which we cannot sustain the retirement system.

Such organizations already exist. Examples include Shift Action in Canada, Investors for Purpose and the Net Zero Lawyers Alliance in the United Kingdom, Market Forces in Australia, the Pension Rights Center in the United States, and many more. The continued influence of these organizations may be a vital part of any sound pension-system reformulation.

Pension holders should also understand their rights as pensioners, which often include having a voice in the investment process and the selection of pension trustees. Most current pension trustees never gaze far beyond their narrow financial fiduciary mandate. Pensioners themselves must learn to push these trustees beyond this confining and counterproductive boundary. Economic stability and planetary health, on which their retirements depend, hang in the balance.

With their labor, taxes, and deductions, people power pensions. They can equally power pension-system reform, contributing to a steady state economy and genuinely prosperous retirement years.

Matt Orsagh is co-founder of Arketa Institute for Post-Growth Finance.

The post The Promise of Post-Growth Pensions appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

El Niño is on the march and in the news. Experts say the 2026–27 El Niño is shaping up to be the strongest on record, and the media is calling it a “Godzilla.” Three months into a cycle that typically lasts nine to twelve months, this El Niño has already caused rainfall deficits in some regions and excesses in others. The most pronounced effects are yet to come.

El Niño is the warm phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which also includes a neutral phase and a cold phase know as La Niña. (International Research Institute for Climate and Society, Public Domain)

International organizations are focused on regions already in crisis. Drought looms over the Sahel, Southern Africa, and Central America’s Dry Corridor. The last El Niño plunged eight million people in Southern Africa into “food insecurity.” That’s the technical term for gnawing hunger, the worrying threat of it, or both. The El Niño before that left 3.5 million people in the Dry Corridor hungry or insecure.

But what about the world’s most productive grain belts? El Niño’s effects on them aren’t negative always and everywhere. They typically increase production in the U.S. Midwest, the world’s top corn-producing region. For the most productive grain-producing region on Earth, the North China Plain, El Niño is a mixed bag.

But South Asia’s immense grain belt, the Indo-Gangetic Plain, is already experiencing rainfall deficits. Vietnam’s major rice-producing region, the Mekong Delta, has been hit by prolonged heatwaves and below-average rainfall associated with previous El Niño events and is bracing for another difficult season. Australia’s wheat belts are in for a drier-than-usual season. The list continues, with lower grain harvests headed for Indonesia and Southern Brazil.

The concerns don’t stop with harvests and hunger. The global economy is at stake. Stores of surplus grain will insulate wealthy nations from “Super” El Niño’s worst, at least for some period of time (and unless conflict renders them inaccessible). But El Niño is getting more extreme; “Super” could become the norm. This will amplify the agricultural challenges that climate change already creates. It’s another reminder that we’ll have to reckon, sooner rather than later, with limits to growth.

Grain Belts: An Overview

Why the focus on grain? Fisheries are particularly vulnerable to El Niño events, and surely other crops will be impacted by this “Super” El Niño as much as grains.

For better or worse, rice, wheat, and maize constitute almost half of human caloric intake. Consumption of animal products is increasing, but this requires even more grain production, for livestock feed. What’s more, grains are better suited for long-term storage than vegetables or fruits, for example. This makes them foundational for stable economies.

The Indo-Gangetic Plain

The Indo-Gangetic Plain (IGP) stretches 2,400 kilometers from eastern Pakistan, across the north of India, and encompasses all of Bangladesh. Several major rivers converge here, enriching the soil with regular flooding and supporting one of the world’s densest populations. The region produces around 80 million metric tons of wheat a year, making India the world’s second-largest wheat producer. The IGP also produces much of the rice consumed domestically, contributing to India’s status as the largest producer and exporter of rice.

A farmer harvests wheat in northern India. (Yann Forget, CC-BY-SA)

Estimates of the number of farmers in India vary wildly, averaging around 90 million. At least half reside in the IGP. Grain production here is labor intensive; millions of smallholder farmers rely heavily on the manual labor of themselves and their extended families.

Even without El Niño, nutrient and groundwater depletion threaten agriculture in the IGP. Due partly to this, the region doesn’t support as high of a yield as some other major grain belts. Compared to global yields, IGP wheat harvests per hectare are similar, while rice yields are slightly lower. But in terms of sheer production and number of people fed, the IGP is globally critical.

India’s grain exports peaked in 2022 at 8 and 35 million metric tons of wheat and rice, respectively. However, in the wake of the grain shocks from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, India banned wheat exports. In May of this year, the government announced it would allow traders to export five million metric tons.

The Mekong Delta

Rice and shrimp aquaculture in Vietnam’s Soc Trang province in the Mekong Delta. (Dr. Nhuong Tran, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Next, let’s go to southern Vietnam, where the Mekong River branches into a vast delta of smaller channels and wetlands. Extending into Cambodia, the Mekong Delta covers around 55,000 square kilometers. Explosive population growth has driven intensive agricultural production in the region, mainly of rice and aquaculture products such as pangasius and shrimp.

The Mekong Delta produces less grain than the IGP—22 million metric tons of rice per year—but it is also smaller. It yields almost 50% more rice per hectare. The region also yields more rice per farmer than the IGP, due in part to mechanization. But its labor productivity is still low compared to the fully industrialized, “factory farm” grain belts, with around 1.5 million small-scale rice producers.

Rice yields in the Mekong Delta have plateaued and are unlikely to last, as erosion, saltwater intrusion, and pollution pose serious threats. Not to mention stronger El Niño events.

This spells trouble for Vietnam, Southeast Asia, and the world. The Mekong Delta produces the vast majority of Vietnam’s rice exports, and Vietnam is the world’s third-largest rice exporter. The top importers are other countries in the region, but Vietnam also exports rice to Africa—notably, around 350 million dollars’ worth to Cote d’Ivoire annually.

Australia

The vastness of Australia is not all Outback. Southern Australia is home to three agricultural regions that enable the country to produce over 34 million metric tons of wheat per year. Still, despite massive investments in agricultural innovation, Australia’s wheat production per hectare is relatively low. There’s only so much you can do on Earth’s driest inhabited continent.

But technology use has made Australia’s labor productivity—distinct from yield, which is a measure of land productivity—far higher than in the IGP or the Mekong Delta. It’s no coincidence that Australia’s GDP per capita is almost five times higher than India’s or Vietnam’s. The industrialization of its agriculture sector has freed up labor for other sectors. Indeed, though agriculture accounts for only two percent of Australia’s GDP, the sector’s surpluses have enabled the development of services, Australia’s biggest money maker.

High agricultural labor productivity has freed up Australian workers for other sectors, enabling one of the biggest economies per capita. (data from World Development Indicators)

And there’s plenty to go around. Australia exports the vast majority of its wheat, making it the third largest exporter. Fast-growing China is the number one buyer of these exports by far. Big economies rely on a big agricultural base.

But Australia’s high labor productivity can’t be sustained beyond ecological limits. In a +2°C warming scenario, the country would need an estimated four percent increase in its agricultural workforce. But the labor force is moving in the opposite direction. The number of agricultural workers has declined steadily since 2020, despite the fact that Australia’s population growth rate spiked at the beginning of the decade. Most of the country’s rural youth leave agriculture and don’t turn back.

Declining profitability may be a driver of this sectoral migration. Climate change has already reduced Australian farm profits by a quarter, on average. And more intense El Niño events are coming to take their toll.

El Niño Incoming

Though nothing about El Niño forecasting is certain, this weather phenomenon has negatively impacted the IGP, the Mekong Delta, and Australia in the past. And there’s reason to believe the impacts will be amplified for this year’s “Super” El Niño.

In the Indus Plain, part of the Indo-Gangetic Plain, humans are depleting upwards of 25 kilometers cubed of water per year. (Ranjith, CC BY-SA 4.0)

The IGP is so vast that, historically, El Niño’s crop impacts have varied across the region, including wheat-production increases in some parts. The main culprit of overall production decreases is drought. India relies on summer monsoons, from June to September, for 70–90 percent of its rainfall. No two monsoon seasons are alike, making it difficult to isolate El Niño’s effects.

But this year’s summer monsoon is shaping up to be the weakest in nearly two decades. A 35 percent rainfall deficit in June caused farmers to plant rice later than usual. Below-average rainfall in August and September has hampered the critical rice-development stages of pod formation and grain filling. And when farmers plant wheat in October, the soil moisture will be lower than optimum.

In the Mekong Delta, past El Niños have caused prolonged heatwaves, below-average rainfall, and saltwater intrusion. This year, these weather anomalies threaten 350,000 hectares of rice. Vietnam’s Plant Production and Protection Department issued a statement that at-risk farmers should reduce their acreage of autumn-winter rice, planted June–August, or forego planting altogether. Presumably, many farmers would need to find other work to supplement their income.

In Australia, El Niño is arriving on the heels of higher-than-usual rainfall. Farmers have scrambled to take advantage of the extra water, planting wheat later than usual. But even with the increased production from May rains, dry El Niño conditions are expected to cut this year’s wheat harvest by around nine million metric tons. That’s a 25 percent drop from last year.

This El Niño may positively affect some of the world’s major grain belts. But it’s highly unlikely that any production gains will outweigh the losses. Large quantities of food at the “trophic base” of the global economy are at stake this year and next.

Of course, the world has even larger quantities of food in storage—over 740 million metric tons of maize, wheat, and rice. Because of this, impacts of El Niño on global GDP would likely lag while surpluses are liquidated, and could be mitigated by agricultural rebounds in subsequent years. But how many “Super” El Niño events—at what frequency and severity—can we take before the global GDP meter starts rolling in reverse?

El Niño and Climate Change

Climate attribution is fraught with uncertainty, but one thing is not: El Niño is getting more intense. Weather associated with El Niño is getting more extreme, observable especially in terms of temperature. El Niño events contributed to record-breaking global temperatures in 1998, 2016, and 2024.

El Niño and La Niña can cause more severe temperature peaks and troughs, but, ultimately, economic activity is the key driver behind global warming. (Carbon Brief, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

A team of scientists used coral skeletons to estimate El Niño intensity over the last one thousand years. They concluded that the intensification of El Niño in recent decades cannot be explained by natural variation. Their findings indicate that human-caused climate change “supercharges” El Niño, with the developing Godzilla the latest example.

Climate change is also making El Niño less predictable. A region prone to drought during El Niño may experience a flash flood in the midst of that drought. This can be even more devastating to crops than a steady lack of water.

Limits to “Warranted” Money

The economy’s trophic levels consist of agricultural and extractive sectors (producers), heavy manufacturing (primary consumers), and light manufacturing (secondary consumers). Services are really “gervices” and inextricable from goods and their trophic structure.

The moral of the story is that food security is at greater risk the further we hurdle past planetary boundaries. The global economy depends on food security; it’s built upon a base of agricultural extraction, like a pyramid. And according to the trophic theory of money, the number of mouths fed per farmer determines how many workers are available for other sectors and, in turn, how big the economy can grow.

In terms more relevant to economists, policy makers, investors, and financial journalists, food surplus ultimately determines the “warranted money supply,” or the amount of real (non-inflated) money availed for circulation. And when it comes to food surplus, grain harvests take—or make—most of the cake.

The warranted money supply arises not only from this season’s harvest, waxing and waning among the major grain belts in the North and South hemispheres. Reserves from prior seasons provide a nutritional and monetary buffer for bad harvests. But global wheat storage amounts to less than half the wheat produced each year, while corn storage is equivalent to around 30 percent of annual production. The situation for rice, which doesn’t keep as long, is more dire: Reserves amount to about five percent of annual production.

In other words, our stores wouldn’t last long if environmental degradation or conflict ground production to a halt. When Russia’s invasion of Ukraine disrupted production in the important breadbasket, experts estimated the world had ten weeks of wheat supplies stored. And unequal distribution of grain reserves—over half of which are held by China—makes this failsafe vulnerable to geopolitical tension.

Our dependence on food is a core principle of ecology that the governments and economists of “developed” countries tend to lose sight of. We are animals embedded in ecosystems, and no manner of information economy or artificial intelligence can change that.

No monetary policy can change it, either. It doesn’t matter what our central banks do to “stimulate” the economy, in the traditional sense of lowering interest rates or the more outlandishly inflationary sense of “quantitative easing.” Without the harvests and labor productivity to match, any such stimuli are bound to cause inflation, adding “first-world” strain to the misery of hunger suffered in regions lacking surplus.

If “Super” El Niños, climate change, and the myriad other manifestations of ecological overshoot demand a smaller global economy, smaller it shall be. Mother Nature bats last. Shouldn’t we be on her team?

Alix Underwood is assistant director at CASSE.

The post The Super El Niño, Global Grain Belts, and Warranted Money appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

At this point in his second term, it is clear that President Trump represents an unmitigated disaster for the steady state. His deregulatory onslaught is removing barriers to growth throughout the economy. The consequences for human health, the environment, and democratic participation are untold and mounting.

Trump’s attacks on reproductive rights have been a consistent feature of his presidency. (Mark Dixon, CC by 2.0)

His foreign policy, energy policy, and food policy are similarly crafted for growth—of the most unsavory and polluting industries.

Trump’s unflagging commitment to growth also manifests in his approach toward population and reproductive health. He has aligned himself with those who wish to roll back decades of progress in gender equality, contraceptive access, and the lowered birth rates that result. This has meant, at home and abroad, aggressive pronatalist policy to stifle reproductive choice and promote childbearing.

Rolling Back Reproductive Rights at Home

Since 1970, Title X has been the only federal program dedicated solely to improving access to contraception. The federal grant program has provided nearly $300 million annually for free and low-cost family planning services. This care has prevented more than 800,000 unintended pregnancies every year.

These funds were never used to perform abortion. But Title X program services included counseling and referrals for the full range of reproductive options, until Trump’s 2019 gag order prohibited the mere mention of abortion. More than 181,000 unintended pregnancies likely resulted, and many providers left the program before Biden reversed the gag order.

In Trump’s second term, his administration has gone to even greater pronatalist extremes.

Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued funding guidance that turns Title X’s mission on its head. It mentions contraception only once, to point out its side effects and declining use. Instead, it notes that priorities of “healthy pregnancies and family formation” will guide its grantmaking.

The Trump Administration’s new Moms.gov website.

But the Trump administration is not content with merely removing contraceptive access. Trump has launched a website that promotes “crisis pregnancy centers,” fake abortion clinics staffed by anti-choice volunteers.

He has canceled millions of dollars in teen pregnancy prevention grants. New guidelines require applicants to promote abstinence, and focus more on planning for pregnancy than preventing it.

Yes, even for teens.

Calling himself the “father of fertility,” Trump has proposed a rule that expands access to IVF. The rule does not mention that these treatments are seldom successful and come at great emotional, physical, as well as financial cost to those who endure them.

Attacking Reproductive Rights Abroad

The loss of USAID has led to millions of unintended pregnancies, as well as hundreds of thousands of deaths from poverty, disease, and malnutrition. (U.S. Navy)

In keeping with the tradition of every Republican president since 1984, Trump has reinstated the Global Gag Rule. Previous versions applied only to programs funded through family planning and reproductive-health assistance from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). They prohibited these programs from performing, or even offering information on, abortion.

Trump’s 2017 version of the rule was expanded to cover all global health aid distributed through any U.S. government agency or department. A 2026 update goes even further. As of January 2026, the rule applies to all non-military U.S. foreign-health, development, and humanitarian assistance. Impacted recipients now include not just international NGOs, but domestic NGOs, international organizations like the UN, and foreign governments.

These cuts come on top of the administration’s dismantling of the entire U.S. foreign aid apparatus. Elon Musk’s short-lived stint in the Trump administration had long-term consequences, with his “Department of Government Efficiency’s” elimination of USAID. This move slashed tens of billions of dollars of aid to address poverty and disease across the world.

This included millions of dollars of family planning and contraceptive aid. The loss of this aid likely resulted in over 17 million unintended pregnancies in 2025 alone.

What has become of that aid belies any notion that the cuts were in service of “government efficiency.” Nearly ten million dollars in contraceptives still languish in a storehouse in Belgium. These now-expired supplies could have provided pregnancy prevention to nearly a million people. NGOs have offered to purchase and distribute these supplies, but the administration instead is opting to store them at a cost of $460,000.

This sum could have provided contraception to nearly 44,000 women and couples and prevented 15,700 unintended pregnancies and 4,800 abortions.

USAID worked alongside the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) to provide family planning services in more than 150 countries and territories. But Trump has cut off UNFPA funding as well, citing a 40-year-old provision that prohibits U.S. funding for “coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization.” There is no credible evidence that UNFPA has been involved in either.

Baby Bust Alarmism in Service of GDP

This hostility to contraception is rooted in several trends on the political right. Conventional conservatives like J.D. Vance extol traditional gender roles and the high birth rates associated with them. Meanwhile tech eugenicists like Elon Musk encourage “elites” to procreate, in hopes of improving the “genetic quality” of future generations. For these administration officials, economic considerations are not the driving force of their pronatalism.

Elon Musk, father of fourteen, has said that the “collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far.” (Marco Verch, CC-BY-NC 2.0)

But for some who call the declining U.S. fertility rate a “crisis,” economic concerns are front and center. Media outlets lament a shrinking labor force and imperiled social security as governments weigh baby bonuses to forestall such outcomes.

Such policy puts anachronistic pressures on women to increase reproduction, and sidelines their agency in one of the most important decisions of their lives.

And it does so in unabashed service of GDP.

In a particularly glaring example, the attorneys general of Kansas, Missouri, and Ohio have sued the federal government to ban mifepristone for minors. They argue that remote dispensing of the abortion drug is “depressing expected birth rates for teenaged mothers.” The consequent “loss of potential population,” they say, causes “injuries” such as the states’ “diminishment of political representation” and “loss of federal funds.” Injuries, in short, that may deprive the state of hoped-for economic growth.

Wherever Women Have Access to Contraceptives

The sinister objectives behind efforts to enforce childbirth are seldom so thinly veiled. But pronatalist pressures, whether pressures from a partner for heirs, from a political leader for more taxpayers, or from business leaders for cheap labor, are everywhere. And they skew reproductive decision-making toward childbirth.

Global fertility has declined by more than half since the 1960s, due to family planning programs that provide contraception while empowering women and girls. (Our World in Data, CC by 4.0)

Yet their power is diminishing as women and girls gain access to education, employment, and modern contraception. More than half the countries around the world have birth rates below 2.1 children per couple. That figure includes rich countries and poor, deeply religious and largely secular. Below-replacement fertility is slated to eventually shrink populations toward sustainable levels more congruent with national security and international stability.

In fact, wherever women have access to contraceptives and empowerment to use them, they do exactly that. The trend is so well-established that researchers posit a “latent desire” among women of all cultures, throughout much of history, to have fewer children.

This is great news for a steady-state transition.

Demographic transition theory has long dimmed hopes for a steady state. This theory holds that birth rates decline only following substantial increases in GDP/capita. So the smaller global human population necessary for planetary systems to flourish, it was thought, could only come with per capita income levels that would threaten that flourishing.

Recent research contradicts this theory. Fertility decline in many developing countries, it turns out, has followed the availability of modern contraception and has little correlation with economic development.

Foreign Aid, Fertility, and Immigration

International aid focused on voluntary family planning programs could be among the most important tools for wealthy countries to advance a global steady state. Yet the United States has been reluctant to wield this tool. Although still the largest international family planning donor when Trump took office in 2025, the United States had slashed this funding long before Trump’s presidency.

And the international community has not stepped in to fill the void. Since the mid-1990s, UNFPA has neglected its family planning mandate.

Frank Götmark, Professor emeritus of Animal Ecology and Conservation Biology at the University of Gothenburg, spoke with the Herald about this trend. Götmark explained how starting in the 1960s, robust international family planning programs not only provided modern contraception in developing countries. They also taught women and girls about the health and economic benefits of limiting their fertility. These educational programs shifted women’s preferences from high fertility to low, empowering them to overcome pronatalist pressures from family members and the patriarchal cultures they lived in.

This norm shifting was key to the success of the programs that led to drastic global fertility reductions between 1960 and 1994.

Since the mid-1990s, however, the focus of UNFPA has moved on from such programs. They are still a major distributor of contraception across the world. However, UNFPA downplays this role in favor of the far more nebulous focus of “sexual and reproductive health and rights.”

The consequences are stark. To this day 215 million women have an unmet need for modern contraception, giving rise to 22 million unplanned pregnancies per year. “Millions of women…face pronatalist forms of coercion, such as being forced to give birth to unwanted children, in the absence of contraceptive services,” says Götmark. Meeting this need would slash the numbers of unintended pregnancies by almost 75 percent. The refusal to do so contributes to the staggering current human population of eight billion, and continued growth of 70 million people per year.

The millions of unplanned pregnancies from Trump’s cuts to family planning programs will add to the unemployment and overcrowding that drive immigration. (Sandor Csudai)

This growth is largely due to lack of access to contraception and stagnant progress in gender equality in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. International family planning assistance would begin to correct these imbalances. It would also address climate change, biodiversity collapse, and other manifestations of ecological overshoot arising from overpopulation.

Countries with continued high fertility are also those that will suffer the most from climate change and deepening resource conflict. These conditions will drive many members of their growing populations to emigrate.

To the limited extent that Donald Trump appeals to steady staters, that appeal likely resides in his stance on immigration. CASSE’s position, outlined in the Sustainable Population and Immigration Act (SPIA), accepts some immigration restrictions as consistent with a steady state.

But key to SPIA is that borders are tightened only after the United States embraces the steady state as a policy goal. Even then, SPIA envisions some level of migration to counteract declining birth rates: “…immigration levels, that, considering fertility, mortality, and emigration rates, result in a stabilized U.S. population.”

This vision of “steady-state net migration” articulated by Brian Czech is about as far from current immigration policy as one could imagine. As Czech notes, “Morally decrepit population management is not only wrong in a normative sense; it won’t stand a test of time, either.”

While Trump implements a draconian, reckless anti-immigration policy, he also pulls out all the stops to grow GDP and GDP per capita. Trump’s tightening of borders is consistent with neither human rights nor a steady state.

U.S. policy abroad, from the abandonment of family planning to the funding of genocide and the initiation of war, has led to the immiseration of millions. For future administrations that seek to correct these abuses—and to move prudently toward a steady state economy—full restoration of family-planning aid would be a good place to start.

Kirsten Stade is a staff writer at CASSE.

The post Trump’s Pronatalist Policy for GDP Growth appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

U.S. capital markets—what we often call “Wall Street”—allegedly supply one critical economic function. They provide investment capital to those who need it and are best prepared to use it. A finance veteran might say the bigger and freer Wall Street is, the better. More capital from the nation’s investment banks means bigger ventures, greater marketplace competition, and increased productivity.

“Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on the steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation.” — John Maynard Keynes. (Gandie, CC BY-SA 4.0)

But bigger and more productive isn’t always good for people or planet. As Franklin Roosevelt noted when he signed the 1933 Securities Act, “…the merchandising of securities is really traffic in the economic and social welfare of our people.” Knee-deep in the Wall Street of the mythical “roaring twenties,” FDR understood the nexus between investment banking and industrial-age productivity. But he also had a fine sense of Wall Street’s corruption, its role in generating historic levels of inequality, and its need for robust regulatory oversight.

U.S. capital markets are powerful economic forces. Though numbers of publicly listed companies and initial public offerings have declined over the last thirty years, their total value has continued to increase. This reflects intense market concentration and the American affinity for runaway investment bubbles.

An important question hovers above it all: Do U.S. capital markets drive an unending search for growth that Earth cannot sustain?

Asset Valuation Gone Awry

Prior to the 1930s, investors couldn’t count on honest appraisals of company performance. Without good information for long-term investment decisions, many investors simply speculated. They bought and sold assets quickly for capital gains, creating investment bubbles that resulted in the infamous stock-market crash of 1929. Wall Street imperiled the U.S. economy just as often as it underwrote innovation and productivity.

Established in 1934, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission regulates American capital markets. (APK, CC BY-SA 3.0)

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), launched by FDR in the 1930s, was a response to this immense fraud and dysfunction. Its reporting requirements made it difficult for corporations to fudge their numbers when promoting the sale of their stocks or bonds.

The SEC has remained fairly effective at ferreting out bad asset information. But as Wall Street has evolved—perfecting new, opaque investment instruments and popularizing the efficient market hypothesis—regulation must also evolve.

In the wake of the dot com and housing bubbles, and with many close observers warning of an AI bubble, it’s time to reinvigorate the SEC. Without significant reform, efficient capital allocation will continue to give way to inequality, fraud, and a planet-killing focus on perpetual capital gains.

Liability and Local Bonds

Mindful that there’s a healthy baby somewhere in this enormous tub of murky bathwater, what should we fix? A good place to start is liability. Prior to 1970, all prominent Wall Street firms were partnerships. This meant that firm owners and managers assumed much of the risk inherent to their investments. Alongside robust SEC regulation, this liability kept investment banks’ worst tendencies in check.

The tides turned in 1970, when the first investment bank sold ownership shares to public investors. Offloading liability onto shareholders has freed investment banks for casino-like behavior. The resumption of a system where owners and managers are liable for investment decisions is long overdue.

In January 2007, President Bush celebrates the boom before the housing bust caused largely by bond-market misbehavior. (The White House)

Bond markets—a poorly understood segment of U.S. capital markets—also require significant reform and more SEC oversight. They are too costly, inefficient, and unreliable for most passive investors, who are staked to bonds by their pensions, 401K accounts, and mutual funds. One major issue is that private, for-profit agencies conduct the business of bond rating. Conflicts of interest regularly compromise the integrity and efficiency of bond rating, which regulators and institutional investors, such as pension funds, rely on to enforce rules and allocate capital.

Another major bond-market issue is the prevalence of specialized local-government bonds, which are often tied to special taxation zones or economic development projects. Compared with general-obligation bonds, which are tied to the full faith and credit of the issuing government, these specialized bonds carry higher interest rates. This directs taxpayer dollars from other public needs to the bank accounts of usually wealthy bond buyers.

Cutting Wall Street Down to Size

We’ve often heard that Wall Street isn’t the economy. Indeed, the corporate obsession with stock prices and capital gains tends to sacrifice real productivity and shared prosperity. Companies increasingly tie executive pay to stock performance. Startup founders and venture capitalists prioritize cashing out through a big sale or initial public offering. If stock-price gains and “successful exits” are the goals, quarterly growth matters more than building a sustainable business.

Reflecting these backward priorities, the net value of corporate stock issuance in a typical year amounts to zero. Publicly traded companies, eschewing real investment and hoping to goose their stock prices (and corresponding executive pay), quickly buy back more stock than they issue. To grow quickly—with little regard for long-term value—companies stifle competition, squeeze workers, and gouge customers.

Growth for its own sake should have no place in U.S. capital markets. Only real productivity, economies of scale, and actual returns on selective investments remain worthy goals in a steady state economy. And a steady state economy—built on respect for the planet, workers, consumers, and investors—entails optimally scaled capital markets.

J. P. Morgan as Wall Street’s bull, blowing bubbles for eager investors. (Puck, public domain)

Cutting Wall Street down to a sustainable size requires minimizing market dependance on economically and environmentally destructive investment bubbles. Key reforms to achieve this include taxing securities and international-currency trades, eliminating favorable capital-gains tax treatment, and limiting stock-exchange trading hours.

Finally, U.S. capital markets reform wouldn’t be complete without pension reform. Pre-1970s, public pension systems functioned well on a pay-as-you-go basis. Because current beneficiaries’ benefits were funded by current contributors, these systems didn’t rely on outsized stock-market gains.

Today, public and private pensions are treated like a liability to minimize or keep out of the budget, rather than another form of worker compensation. Companies and governments hand the reins to pension funds to invest for the biggest and fastest returns. Much like other investment institutions, these funds speculate, allocate resources poorly, and further inflate investment bubbles. The resulting ecological degradation undermines the very futures these pension funds are meant to secure.

The Act

A new feeder bill for the Steady State Economy Act, the Sustainable Capital Markets Act (SCMA), is a launchpad for capital-markets reform. The SCMA comprises fourteen sections. Sections 1–3 establish the bill’s short title, Congress’s findings and declarations, and definitions. One of the findings is that present U.S. financial sector management encourages speculation and rent-seeking at the expense of the efficient allocation of capital resources. The SCMA discourages or prohibits key elements of this behavior.

Section 4 is designed to reverse the transfer of investment risks from firm owners and managers to public shareholders. It requires partnership agreements that would make investment-bank “partners” personally liable for a large portion of potential firm losses. This would reward and maximize sustainable investment behavior.

Section 5 reverses an amendment to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010. The amendment was signed into law in 2018 by President Trump. Dodd-Frank protected shareholders and U.S. taxpayers from bailouts of “too-big-to-fail” investment banks by applying “enhanced prudential standards” for banks with more than $50 billion in assets. The 2018 amendment loosened several of these standards and raised the threshold for their application to $250 billion. In addition to reversing this amendment, the SCMA transfers the performance of annual stress tests—one of the prudential standards—from investment banks to the federal Financial Stability Oversight Council.

Sections 6 and 7 focus on American bond markets. Section 6 phases out for-profit bond rating agencies. Section 7 requires that all municipal and state bonds be general-obligation securities, tied to the full faith and credit of the issuing government. It also eliminates the preferential tax treatment that municipal-bond income currently receives. Though this treatment theoretically makes state and local government borrowing less expensive, its primary benefits flow to wealthy investors, even while the federal debt balloons.

Sections 8 and 9 create two new transaction taxes, one for domestic securities trading and the second for international currency trading. For both, the object is to discourage volatile arbitrage in which insider trading, hot capital flows, and destabilizing transactions favor wasteful speculation over the exchange of essential products and services.

Section 10 introduces two changes to the U.S. tax code, to discourage the chase for capital gains. Current tax code treats capital gains more favorably than simple profits. This bias generates an artificial drive for growth, at the expense of value or need. The SCMA requires that capital gains and corporate dividends be taxed the same as “ordinary income.”

Section 11 is designed to discourage and ultimately eliminate cryptocurrency mining, which needlessly consumes vast amounts of energy. First, banks insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation are prohibited from dealing in cryptocurrency. Second, all cryptocurrency mining is prohibited. Third, a tax is applied to all cryptocurrency holdings owned by individuals or corporations.

To end the drive for 24/7 securities trading, section 12 mandates a limited (and traditional) six-and-one-half hour trading period based on U.S. Eastern Standard Time trading hours. This is meant to reorient trading to value rather than timing, to real investment rather than manipulation and speculation.

Section 13 requires public pension systems to return to a pay-as-you-go structure. Funded with a progressive tax system, this change would divorce pensions from speculation and antithetical corporate behavior. This section also compels private pension systems to maintain a reserve equal to 75 percent of their estimated thirty-year accrued liability. Section 13 also limits private pension fund investments to U.S. Treasury securities. This would lower returns, forcing companies to fund pensions mostly with current cash flow. This would also transform private pension funds into a significant source of public investment, which has a lighter ecological impact (especially pursuant to a Sustainable Budgets Act) than runaway speculation.

Traffic in the nation’s economic and social welfare, or speculative sideshow? (vishpool, CC BY 2.0)

Finally, section 14 defines the penalties and enforcement for any violations of the cryptocurrency and trading-hours prohibitions in sections 11 and 12. As for the bill’s other provisions, each section specifies the entity—primarily the SEC or the IRS—responsible for determining how they will be enforced.

On a finite planet, where overshoot has become all too common, the status quo serves nobody’s interest. Inequality and instability prevail when our wellbeing and planet require the opposite. When our nation’s capital markets actively undermine a sustainable, equitable framework, they surely require change. The Sustainable Capital Markets Act is designed to make these markets do what we need them to do. Broad prosperity, not perpetual growth, is the principal goal.

David Shreve is a Senior Economist at CASSE.

The post Introducing the Sustainable Capital Markets Act appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

There isn’t any specific scientific consensus on the precise impact of livestock on the climate. It is a contentious issue, partly because it’s so difficult to measure. We can say, however, that the impact is likely colossal.

Moving towards plant-based diets will not, by itself, solve the climate problem. We still need to end our reliance on fossil fuels. However, it is necessary to solve the climate problem.

European settlers cleared forests like this for pasture and hay fields, now open meadows in today’s Great Smoky Mountains National Park. (Keith Akers)

Of course, just because something is “unsustainable” doesn’t mean we can’t do it anyway! Long before it becomes physically impossible to raise more cattle, though, we encounter increasingly unpleasant consequences, such as soil erosion, groundwater depletion, and rising medical costs. Halting the runaway consequences of livestock agriculture requires a sustainable, steady state economy, encompassing sustainable scale in the livestock industry along with all other sectors.

But let’s focus on one particularly nasty consequence of livestock production: climate change. The scientific community overwhelmingly acknowledges the reality and urgency of climate change. The American public also acknowledges it, though less overwhelmingly.

However, there is much less discourse—scientific or public—about livestock’s contribution to the problem. It is a contentious topic for complex reasons. And while mainstream science focuses almost exclusively on direct emissions from livestock production, there may be more to the livestock-climate story.

A Complex Problem

A key reason livestock’s impact on the climate is hotly debated is that it is difficult to assess land-use impact.

The main human use of land is for agriculture. Agriculture dwarfs urban development, roads, and buildings in the sheer area of land involved. And of that land, about 80 percent is for livestock production. So if we’re talking about land use, for the most part we’re talking about livestock.

We use 30 percent of Earth’s habitable land to graze livestock. (Flickr, Public Domain)

Land use affects the number and type of plants and animals, and plants and animals are key factors in the natural carbon cycle. Plants absorb carbon dioxide (CO2), and animals respire CO2. Due to human land use, plants are decreasing, and animals are increasing, in terms of biomass. This creates an imbalance that impacts the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

To measure these impacts, scientists are turning to the relatively new concept of “carbon opportunity cost.” In the livestock-production context, this refers to the additional carbon the land and its vegetation would absorb if not converted to grazing land or cropland for livestock feed. This concept can also be applied to cropland used to feed humans directly. This would enable comparison between the carbon opportunity cost of producing the same number of calories or grams of protein via animal- versus plant-based foods. Such analyses get complex quickly, especially when one considers the drastic regional differences in livestock and crop productivity.

A Contentious Problem

Methane is another complex and contentious factor regarding livestock production’s impact on the climate. Agriculture is the single largest anthropogenic source of methane, and most of that is from livestock. But there is no agreement on the best way to assess methane’s impact.

Methane has a much greater impact than CO2 in terms of its warming potential, but it also breaks down fairly quickly in the atmosphere. The net impact depends on the time frame we choose, and scientists and policymakers have not agreed on what time frame is most appropriate.

If the Trump Administration’s new food pyramid is any indicator, U.S. research on food and agriculture continues to suffer from corporate capture. (RealFood.gov, Public Domain)

Finally…politics. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations is influenced, if not effectively controlled, by the livestock industry. In 2012 they announced an official partnership with the meat and dairy industries.

Even basic data like the number of cows is often contested. In the early 2000s, many non-governmental organizations reported double the number of cattle that the FAO did. Even the FAO’s own data on poultry production differs from report to report by a factor of two. Their April 2003 Food Outlook puts the amount of poultry produced in 2002 at 72.9 million metric tons, while Livestock’s Long Shadow provides a figure of 33.0 million metric tons.

President Trump has exacerbated the problem with his attacks on scientific research, but the lack of solid livestock data pre-dates the Trump Administration by decades.

What’s with the Carbon Cycle?

To untangle the complexity surrounding land use, an overview of the short-term carbon cycle helps.

CO2 is circulating into and out of the atmosphere due to natural processes. Most emissions are not human-caused; anthropogenic CO2 emissions amount to only three percent of the emissions from natural sources. This is not three percent of CO2 in the atmosphere, but an extra three percent of CO2 emissions. In the natural world, carbon sources (such as decaying organic matter and animal respiration) are roughly counter-balanced by carbon sinks (soils, oceans, and photosynthesis).

Photosynthesis—through which (among other things) plants absorb CO2 from the atmosphere and emit oxygen—is a key process in the short-term carbon cycle. When plants die, microbes in the soil consume them and release CO2 back into the atmosphere. However, some of the carbon from plant matter is stabilized in the soil, as well, for long-term storage.

Beef cattle in a feedlot in New Mexico, United States. Not a lot of photosynthesis going on here. (Quintin Soloviev, CC0 1.0)

Earth’s soils hold more carbon than its atmosphere and vegetation combined. Oceans are also key in the short-term carbon cycle. They are currently massive carbon sinks, but their ability to absorb CO2 is limited.

Historically, these processes—photosynthesis, decay, respiration, and absorption and emissions from oceans—have typically balanced each other out. There are also long-term carbon cycles. The ice-age cycle, and the even longer-term geological carbon cycle, can last hundreds of thousands or millions of years. For our purposes, we can ignore these. (For the very long-term thinkers: Watch out for that next ice age.)

Carbon Opportunity Cost

The most obvious way to disrupt the short-term carbon cycle is to put extra CO2 into the atmosphere, such as by burning fossil fuels. But a different way is to reduce the amount of photosynthesis. Let’s consider the very real example of someone burning the Amazon rainforest to create grazing land in Brazil. The direct CO2 emissions can be considerable.

Over 60 percent of the Amazon area deforested from 1988 to 2014 is used to raise cattle. (Vicente Bissoni Neto, CC BY-SA 4.0)

But the burning itself is a one-time event. What about next year? Left to itself, in many cases the forest would begin to regrow, drawing CO2 out of the air and incorporating the carbon into tree growth. But in this case, cattle grazing obstructs reforestation.

Of course, plants still grow on pastureland. Forests may have immense carbon-storage capacity, but how do their rates of ongoing carbon sequestration compare with grazing lands? It depends. Grasslands with deep root systems can be powerful sequesterers, and cattle grazing can degrade or augment that power, depending on management practices.

In our Brazilian-Amazon example, the grazing land would almost certainly have a lower rate of carbon sequestration than the forest it replaced. That’s because the Brazilian Amazon biome has the highest carbon sequestration potential of all the world’s forests. It is also one of the world’s most deforested biomes, currently, though forests have long been victims of economic activity.

Humans have reduced the number of trees on Earth by almost half. Yet, forests still constitute 80 to 90 percent of Earth’s plant biomass. Though difficult to measure across varying habitats and management practices, the impact of replacing these invaluable carbon sinks with pastureland could be immense.

And yet, forests aren’t the only ecosystems being converted into grazing land. Likely due in part to the attention forests receive, natural grasslands and wetlands are being lost to agriculture at a rate four times higher than forests. Over half of this conversion has been to raise livestock or their feed. This phenomenon is happening on such a large scale, that it would be foolish not to seek to better understand its carbon opportunity cost.

More Animals, Fewer Plants

Even before trying to estimate carbon opportunity costs, there are two reasons to believe it’s quite big: Large mammal biomass (and total animal biomass) is substantially increasing, and plant biomass is crashing. This is despite declines in populations of wild large animals, or megafauna.

North America provides a tragic example of these declines. The American bison population plummeted from 60 million in the 1850s to only a few thousand in the 1880s. Globally, elephant (carbon) biomass declined an estimated 90 percent in the 20^th century. 70 percent of the world’s wild megafauna species are declining in numbers.

But increases in humans and our livestock have far outstripped decreases in wild megafauna. Cattle (carbon) biomass increased 250 percent in the 20^th century. In 2000, humans and our domesticated animals constituted an incredible 97 percent of all terrestrial animal (including human) biomass. And about two-thirds of large-animal biomass is livestock, which has about double the mass of the human population! The large animals on Earth are now mostly cows and people. 

Estimates of total biomass (as opposed to carbon biomass) by UC Berkeley researcher Anthony Barnosky. BP stands for before present. (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 105 (Supp. 1): 11543-11548. Copyright 2008.)

As bad as the increase in animal biomass—and resultant increase in respired CO2—is, it’s gone hand in hand with another, perhaps more alarming, biological problem. In a “full world,” more land dedicated to animals means less available for plants. Phytomass (plant biomass) has dramatically declined under human influence. Vaclav Smil at the University of Manitoba estimates it has declined by half in the last 5,000 years.

This is corroborated by a more recent study. Researchers estimated that, without human influence, Earth would contain 916 billion metric tons of plant matter. In reality, it only contains 450 billion. How do you think the destruction of half of Earth’s plant life might impact photosynthesis and, in turn, CO2 levels?

To be clear, not all of this plant destruction has been for the sake of livestock production. But recall that agriculture dwarfs other human land uses and livestock production dwarfs other agricultural land uses. Sure, producing less in animal products would mean producing more in plant products for human consumption. But it takes an estimated 50 to 100 times more land to produce a gram of protein from beef compared to peas or tofu.

Of course, not all land is suitable for crops. But when some researchers say plant-based diets could cut agricultural land use by 75 percent, it’s time to rethink how we’re using Earth’s carbon sequestration potential.

Measuring the Impact

We have good reason to believe the climate impact of expanding animal biomass and decreasing plant matter is large. Yet some experts steadfastly ignore the idea of carbon opportunity cost. The FAO made no mention of it in their 2024 report. This may be due to the involvement of the meat and dairy industries in the FAO. These industries have spent millions to influence public and scientific opinion and have plausibly been accused of hijacking the FAO.

There’s no consensus in favor of the FAO’s figures on livestock’s climate impact. According to some researchers, the FAO figures are substantially understated and we must take more drastic action than they imply. Measuring carbon opportunity cost is hard, but some scientists are attempting to provide alternatives to the FAO figures.

Timothy Searchinger of Princeton University, one of the scientists pioneering carbon opportunity cost, speaks at an OECD forum. (OECD, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Searchinger et al. concluded, “…standard methods for evaluating the effects of land use on greenhouse gas emissions systematically underestimate the opportunity of land to store carbon if it is not used for agriculture.” In a follow-up report, they incorporated these opportunity costs into their estimates: “…western diets overall have much higher greenhouse gas costs than conventionally estimated.” They also found “that the total greenhouse gas costs of beef and dairy globally are 3–4 times those found by the Food and Agriculture Organization…shifting consumption of ruminant meat and dairy to other foods would reduce emissions [from western diets] by 70 percent.”

Hayek et al. concluded a worldwide move towards plant-based diets would sequester an additional 152.5 billion metric tons of CO2. Eisen and Brown published an article for which the title tells it all: “Rapid global phaseout of animal agriculture has the potential to stabilize greenhouse gas levels for 30 years and offset 68 percent of CO2 emissions this century.”

Factoring in carbon opportunity costs only adds to the evidence about direct emissions that has led many experts to back immediate action. A 2024 survey of climate scientists and food experts revealed general agreement that livestock emissions must peak in 2025 and “fall rapidly” in high-income and middle-income countries.

To be clear, to stop climate change this shift toward plant-based diets needs to be in addition to, not instead of, phasing out fossil fuels.

But we will only be successful if we restore populations of the plants that pull CO2 from the air. To restore those populations, we must give back some of the land we’ve claimed for ourselves and our livestock. That’s a key ingredient of a steady state economy: leaving enough resources for the economy of nature, on which the human economy depends, to thrive. Shifting towards plant-based diets is one small price to pay—one that can have myriad benefits for the consumer—for true sustainability.

Keith Akers is an author and activist who blogs at CompassionateSpirit.com.

The post Climatological Limits to Livestock: A Plea for Plant-Based Diets appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

Today, Marinette County is largely covered by forests and wetlands, with intermittent cropland in the south. (Marinette County)

Celebrated today for its extensive forests and pristine streams, Marinette County, Wisconsin, has been in recovery for over a century. Its story is one of dramatic change, demonstrating that given time and stewardship—with respect for limits—the land can mend, nourishing its people.

As glaciers retreated from the region some 12,000 years ago, the barren landscape of the upper Midwest began a successional transition. Climax forests were composed of old-growth pine, hemlock, oak, and maple.

The Menominee, the indigenous people that have inhabited the region for 10,000 years, relied on these forests for sustenance and shelter. Their namesake, the Menominee River, lies on the eastern border of the county. According to the Menominee’s origin story, passed on with oral tradition, their people were created at the mouth of the river where it enters the Green Bay of Lake Michigan.

The region’s indigenous population flourished via fishing, hunting, farming, and harvesting wild rice (manoomin). Viewing the natural world as kin, not just resources, they lived in a steady state.

Paradise Lost, Then Partially Found

Europeans altered the natural balance of the Northwoods. Soon after they arrived, they trapped and traded fur, exploited fish populations, and clearcut forests, displacing the Menominee and their ways of life. The Menominee’s territory was reduced from roughly 10 million acres to a reservation of 235,000 acres. Today, the reservation practically comprises Menominee County, which neighbors Marinette County.

By the early 1900s, Wisconsin’s majestic forests were gone. And as industrial development followed the initial wave of reckless logging, Marinette County faced a new threat of toxic pollution.

An example of sprawling development in Marinette County. (Brian Czech)

But over the past few decades, the county has developed a sense of stewardship that has led to the restoration of much of its former beauty. It is now home to the second largest county forest in Wisconsin. Sustainable timber harvesting is now the standard. Pollution has been largely curtailed, and the land and water have staged a comeback.

Marinette County could well become a model of sustainability. However, sprawling development may impede its progress as the next iteration of economic threat to ecosystems. As in many counties, this type of development is spreading along and out from the county highways and byways. Meanwhile neighboring Menominee County remains unaffected by such sprawl. Local leaders in Marinette County stand to learn from the indigenous practices and worldviews that have enabled Menominee, not only to curb development, but also to set new benchmarks in wetland restoration and forestry.

Origins

Marinette County’s population of permanent residents has plateaued since 2000, landing on approximately 42,000 people in 2020. One quarter of the population lives in the City of Marinette, which serves as the county seat. The city is near where the indigenous village of Menekaunee once stood, at the mouth of the Menominee River.

Plaque honoring Queen Marinette in the City of Marinette, Marinette County, Wisconsin. (Andy Ruff)

The city and county were named for Marie Antoinette Chevalier, a prominent, mixed-heritage French and Menominee leader known locally as “Queen Marinette.” Only a handful of U.S. counties are named to honor indigenous women, attesting to Queen Marinette’s influence among both indigenous and European inhabitants of the region. She established an important trading post and facilitated critical understandings between her tribe, white settlers, and government.

Despite Queen Marinette’s influence, the federal government pressured the Menominee to cede their homeland through various treaties. Eventually, in 1854, the tribe secured a permanent reservation in Menominee County, some 15 miles west of Marinette County. Soon, settlers began clearcutting the deep forest, using the Menominee River as transport for their massive logging operations. Over the course of the lumber-industry boom, companies floated 10 billion feet of logs down the Menominee, scouring the riverbed and covering spawning beds with silt. This severely degraded fish habitat, leading to a decline in fish stocks.

The ravaged landscape, left exposed with dead brush and debris, was primed for wildfire. Adding to the risk, a severe drought in the summer of 1871 left the land parched. On October 8^th of that year, strong winds and high temperatures coincided, and an unprecedented firestorm ensued. The source of the conflagration is unknown, with speculation ranging from untended land-clearing fires to meteor debris.

The fire engulfed the southern third of Marinette County and extended into the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. It reached temperatures of over 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit and created hurricane-like winds of 110 mph. The firestorm incinerated entire communities, claiming over half the population of another Marinette County town, Peshtigo. By October 10th, the fire had reached 1.5 million acres, with an estimated death toll of over 2,500 people. The “Peshtigo Fire” remains the deadliest fire in U.S. history.

Reforestation and Industrialization

After the great fire, residents sought to establish farms on the barren land. However, their efforts were largely met with failure as agricultural prices crashed following World War I. Land abandonment due to failure to pay taxes became common.

Area of the most catastrophic wildfire in U.S. history, with a wood engraving depicting Peshtigo residents fleeing into the Peshtigo River. (left: Ruhrfisch, CC BY-SA 3.0; right: G. J. Tisdale, Public Domain).

In 1930, Marinette County registered the tax-abandoned properties as non-taxable public forest land. They established one of the first county forests, which now occupies one quarter of the county at over 230,000 acres. Further reforestation consisted of efforts by the Civilian Conservation Core (CCC) in the 1930s. After a century of concerted effort, Marinette County now boasts forest cover on over 79% of its land.

But deforestation hasn’t been the only threat to the county’s ecosystems. After the lumber boom and subsequent fire came the development of industry. Paper production, shipbuilding, and eventually chemicals production became mainstays of the local economy. These activities dealt an added blow to the Menominee River with discharges of waste.

Pollution from mills located near the City of Marinette and in the nearby City of Menominee in Michigan severely impacted the region’s habitats and waterways. Tyco, a company that produces fire-retardant foam, was found to have knowingly contaminated ground water with PFAS, or forever chemicals, and kept it a secret for years. These persistent chemicals are a major cause of advisories against eating fish from Lake Michigan.

The combination of impacts led to the lower Menominee River being listed as an Area of Concern (AOC) in 1987, as part of the international Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement. The area was identified as one of the 43 most severely degraded hotspots in the Great Lakes watershed.

The Ongoing Recovery

Marinette County staff dedicated to keeping the county great. (Brian Czech)

Just as Marinette County’s reforestation efforts have proven successful, so has its work to clean up the industrial-waste legacy of the past century. Wisconsin’s state government has used regulations to curtail the sources of pollution, and Marinette County has followed up with extensive work to recover contaminated soil and water. Part of Green Bay was dredged to remove some 30 million pounds of sediment containing industrial-paint sludge and other hazardous waste. 320,000 cubic yards of arsenic-laden deposits were recovered from the Lower Menominee.

Work to shrink the PFAS groundwater plume, including a $25 million groundwater extraction and treatment system, is ongoing. Furthermore, on June 24, 2026, Tyco agreed to pay $10 million into Wisconsin’s PFAS Trust Fund, alongside other provisions, to facilitate a clean-up. After over three decades of efforts and $150 million spent, the Menominee was officially delisted as an AOC in 2020. As a testament to the ongoing restoration, toxins such as PFAS have been declining in fish stocks in the Great Lakes.

21^st-Century Stewardship

Slowly but surely, Marinette County has been healing from two centuries of destructive economic activities. The recovered forests and abundant wetlands in the northern two thirds of the county have protected the numerous streams found there.

An aerial view of the Menominee River. (Bob Wick, CC BY 2.0)

The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (WDNR) has designated over half of Marinette County’s rivers and streams as either Outstanding or Exceptional. The county holds the record for the state in streams of such high quality, providing home for rainbow and brook trout, which are especially sensitive to environmental changes.

For many who work to protect aquatic ecosystems, Marinette County is especially significant because of a landmark 1972 case, Just v. Marinette County. This case, according to professor Rob Fischman of Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law, was one of two that set a standard in defending the Public Trust Doctrine. This doctrine is fundamental in permitting government to protect the environment as a public trust.

Pathways to a Steady State

CASSE President Brian Czech holds the Marinette County Comprehensive Plan, a promising vehicle for steady-state policies. (Brian Czech)

Owing to a stable population and mildly fluctuating GDP of about $2 billion per year, Marinette County could play a leading role in “steady statesmanship” and thereby attain a sustainable, steady state economy. To preserve its biocapacity, the county aims to harvest timber at rates equal to natural regeneration rates.

One major challenge to forest regeneration in many Wisconsin counties, including Marinette, is deer over-abundance. Recent studies by the WDNR indicate that high browse pressure is “chronic or widespread” throughout the county. This hampers the growth of new trees, preventing them from replacing older trees and threatening a sustainable harvest.

Indigenous examples of forest stewardship provide a promising model. Researchers have found that tribal forests in Wisconsin have greater diversity and healthier trees than other forests, public or private. One major difference is that the Menominee government allows year-round deer hunting for sustenance in tribal forests, while there is only a nine-day hunting season in public forests state-wide; a managerial relic from the bad old days of extremely low deer densities in the Northwoods.

Likewise, wetland-stewardship practices of Wisconsin tribes can serve as models for county and state policies. In an interview for the Herald, Erin O’Brien, Policy Programs Director at Wisconsin Wetlands Association, spoke about the state of wetlands in Wisconsin. She pointed to Wisconsin’s impressive record in preventing net loss and restoring wetlands in recent years. And she highlighted tribes, such as the Oneida Nation, as leaders in wetlands restoration and planning.

Furthermore, satellite imagery reveals that low-density development that fragments forests and wetlands is rare in Menominee County, which is mostly composed of the Menominee Indian Reservation. Instead, a clustered development pattern appears dominant in Menominee.

The same cannot be said for Marinette County, where sprawl is expanding along and from many roadways. The resulting fragmentation degrades the environment, as well as the natural beauty of the landscape. But Marinette County can take steps to retain its natural integrity and beauty. For example, they can revise their zoning code. They can expand public land by integrating land forfeitures into the forest as they have done in the past. Adopting policies that maintain farm, forest, and wetland integrity are essential for a steady state.

Coming full circle—employing an ethos that existed among native peoples for thousands of years—is a pathway to a steady state, to keep the county great. Regenerative practices, reciprocal stewardship, and the view that decisions must weigh impacts far into the future should inform Marinette County’s policies.

Will Marinette County hold the line on scattered, low-density development? If so, this would solidify Marinette as a model for other counties, to Keep Our Counties Great for generations to come.

Dave Rollo is a policy specialist and team leader of the Keep Our Counties Great campaign at CASSE.

The post A Return to Greatness in Marinette County, Wisconsin appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

Remains of Elizabeth Furnace in the George Washington National Forest, in Virginia. (Kirsten Stade)

Not two hours from DC, just east of Shenandoah National Park, lies a testament to the power of public lands protection. The Elizabeth Furnace Recreation Area in the George Washington National Forest is a treasure of hiking trails, swimming holes, campgrounds, and picnic areas. These attractions are free or cheap and open to all.

In the springtime, you can take the gently winding Pig Iron and Charcoal Trails through a recovering woodland ablaze with cardinal flowers, dogwoods, and azaleas. You can enjoy the shade and the sound of songbirds as you read interpretive trail signage describing the area’s history. And you can be thankful you didn’t have to experience the brutality of life here 175 years ago.

Elizabeth Furnace was built in 1836 to meet a growing demand for iron. Iron ore, rich in the soils of this area, was fed into the furnace’s white-hot mouth, along with charcoal made from trees repeatedly clearcut from the surrounding hills. Enslaved or poorly paid laborers worked 12-hour shifts under grueling, dangerous conditions. Their labor turned the natural bounty of the land into wrought iron for industry, and, later, for the Civil War.

The transformation of this industrial wasteland into a forested treasure teeming with native life began in 1913. The U.S. Forest Service acquired the land, restored it, and opened the recreation area in 1960.

The U.S. Forest Service: A Century of Public Lands Protection

Countless similar stories could no doubt be told about sites across the 193 million acres of Forest Service lands. The Forest Service, within the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), manages 154 national forests across nine regional offices. The agency has 30,000 staff and until recently operated nearly 80 research labs dedicated to studying local ecological conditions.

To be sure, national forest lands are managed for logging, mineral development, and livestock grazing in addition to conservation and recreation. But the agency’s “sustained yield” mandate has meant at least a degree of protection from the ravages of commercial exploitation.

The system is the product of over 150 years of legislative wrangling, public hearings, citizen advocacy, and scientific input. The consensus of all these efforts has consistently been that national forests should be managed in the public trust by the federal government.

The devastating effects of erosion following deforestation in Colorado, in 1915. The Forest Service was formed to protect waterways from these effects. (USDA Forest Service)

The initial impetus for the creation of the Forest Service was the protection of waterways suffering rapid degradation through deforestation. Over the past 150 years, Forest Service lands have proliferated under foresighted presidents like Teddy Roosevelt. The enormous popularity of places like Elizabeth Furnace has only added legitimacy to the institution.

The story of Elizabeth Furnace encapsulates what public lands protection can do for even the most abused lands. Told in reverse, it could be a warning about the Trump Administration’s current plans for the Forest Service.

“Restructuring” as Politicization

On March 31, the Administration announced plans to “begin a sweeping restructuring of the agency.” These plans include moving Forest Service headquarters from Washington, DC, to Salt Lake City, Utah. They also include closing the nine regional offices that have formed the heart of the agency’s governance since its inception.

At 17 million acres, the Tongass National Forest in Southeast Alaska is the largest U.S. national forest and the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest. (Kevin Hood)

Regional offices are structured around watersheds and forests. Kevin Hood is a 30-year veteran of the Forest Service, many of those years spent in the Alaska Regional Office. In an interview with the Herald, Hood described working among 140 fire specialists, ecologists, engineers, and forest managers. These employees spent decades developing intimate knowledge of the forests in which they lived and worked.

Under Trump’s plan, this entire layer of relative independence from political forces will be eliminated from the Forest Service chain of command. Supervisors of individual forests will report more or less directly to Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz, a former logging industry executive. Mediating that relationship will now be fifteen State Directors, newly created positions within newly created state offices. These offices will be embedded in state capitals, in close proximity to political officials, and will be staffed by six to eight employees.

Forest Service leadership positions have historically been reserved for career professionals hired competitively on a merit basis. But State Director positions and a number of new Forest Service leadership positions are classified so they may be filled by political appointees.

In fact, Trump’s Office of Personnel Management has directed all federal agencies to reclassify career-reserved leadership positions to allow for political appointments. New performance standards for these positions prioritize “faithful administration of…the President’s policies.”

Hood, who is now Executive Director of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, says the restructuring is part of a broader legal effort to assert the “entire executive power” over the federal workforce. “We’re going back to an early 19^th century political system of patronage and spoils characterized by incompetence, corruption, and chaos,” he says.

“Restructuring” as Workforce Reduction

With agency leadership set to be populated by ideological allies, a few obstacles remain in the way of the administration’s public lands exploitation agenda. One is the Forest Service employee rank and file, many of whom remain dedicated to the agency’s conservation mission.

National Forests provide cool respite even in drought-stricken areas like the Lolo National Forest in Montana. (Kirsten Stade)

Agency leadership touts “restructuring” as a way to move this workforce closer to its lands, most of which are in the Western United States. USDA secretary Brooke Rollins publicly insists that the agency is not conducting radical workforce reduction.

The agency’s reorganization plan, unearthed through a lawsuit filed by groups seeking to stop it, tells a different tale. There, USDA states clearly its plans for reducing its workforce by 23 percent: “…a significant number of employees will decline geographic reassignments.”

That is exactly what happened when, in his first term, Trump reorganized the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM), moving its headquarters from DC to Colorado. Fewer than thirteen percent of affected employees agreed to the move. Years later, the agency remains crippled by the lost staff, expertise, and institutional knowledge.

More than 25 percent of Forest Service staff have left already. They leave the agency hollowed out of those who are most knowledgeable about their home forests and their natural systems.

“Restructuring” to Purge Science

Forests like the Manti-La Sal in Utah need prescribed burns to stay in optimal ecological condition. Trump’s plan will empty them of the skilled staff required for active management. (Kirsten Stade)

Many of those who leave will be scientists. The administration is in the process of shuttering more than 50 of the Forest Service’s nearly 80 research labs. These stations have since 1908 composed the largest forestry research organization in the world. Its 500 scientists conduct cutting-edge research on forest ecology, hydrology, wildfire, insects, and disease. In partnership with universities, they have produced nearly 60,000 peer-reviewed publications.

According to Kevin Hood, federal science of this kind is unique in its potential to yield long-term data. Unlike corporate or university research tied to product development or a professor’s short-term grant, many Forest Service studies have run continuously for decades. They include findings on how forest ecosystems respond to changing climate conditions, how best to manage and contain wildfires, and how to recover endangered wildlife. These studies have been critical to the responsible management of public forests and grasslands across the United States.

The Forest Service is shutting down the programs that enable these studies just as record drought turns western states into insect-and disease-prone tinderboxes. And it is doing so just as it compels hundreds of fire ecologists, aviation specialists, and wildland firefighters to leave.

“Restructuring” as Precursor to Federal Divestment

This is all by design. As the administration torpedoes federal capacity to manage national forests, it is in the process of ceding that capacity to the states.

Early this year, Utah Governor Spencer Cox signed a “shared stewardship agreement” with Forest Service Chief Schultz. The agreement gives Utah shared management of wildlife, grazing, minerals, water, and recreation within its 8 million acres of National Forest lands. Utah is the very same state suing the federal government to seize 18.5 million acres of BLM land. Its Senator Mike Lee has repeatedly sought to force the sale of public lands through legislation.

The starvation of federal agency budgets gives states like Utah the opportunity they have long been waiting for. Having failed repeatedly to take ownership of federal lands outright, they can instead assert control over an ever-broadening slice of their management.

Looking out over the Colorado River from the Manti-La Sal National Forest, Utah. (Kirsten Stade)

With the agency hollowed out of career staff who might mount a resistance, the stealth transfer of public lands to state or private entities will be possible. “They’re looking to facilitate the liquidation of resources so they can privatize profit and socialize the cost,” says Hood. With the “guardrails” of agency science and professional staff gone, Hood says, “agency officials can wheel and deal more freely, unbound by law or policy.”

From its first days in office, this administration has shown an unmitigated hostility to public lands. It has opened them to fossil fuel development, and staffed their agencies with former employees of the industries they regulate. It has called for vastly increased national forest logging, and intensive mineral development across fragile deserts sacred to Native tribes. It is currently considering rules that would cut the public out of Forest Service management decisions, and end the creation of new wilderness areas.

This conduct makes sense in light of the administration’s commitment to GDP growth above all else. Public lands confer vast benefits on society as a whole, but limited kickbacks to preferred industries. Under a single-minded focus on GDP, what is in the public interest falls by the wayside as economic growth primarily benefits the already wealthy.

In contrast, as Kevin Hood reminds us, “Public lands are a great equalizer. Everyone owns them.”

If there is hope of protecting public lands from becoming GDP fodder, it is in their overwhelming popularity. “The groundswell of support in favor of public lands is unstoppable,” Hood says.

Public comments on the restructuring submitted last summer were overwhelmingly negative, with over 80 percent conveying concerns about the move. Congress must appropriate funds to close Forest Service offices, which would mean the loss of hundreds of well-paying jobs in members’ districts. Now is a good time to let elected officials know what a bad idea that is.

Kirsten Stade is a staff writer at CASSE.

The post Forest Service “Restructuring”: Bad News for Public Lands appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

A hopeful time when the U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry signed the Paris Agreement in 2016 with his granddaughter on his lap. (U.S. Department of State)

Not a single country monitored by Climate Action Tracker is on track to meet its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction targets. The United States, however, is one of the worst offenders. During the Biden administration, the country pledged to reduce GHG emissions to 50 percent of 2005 levels by 2030. This “nationally determined contribution” (NDC) was a formal pledge to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Climate Action Tracker labels the U.S. government’s policies and actions as “highly insufficient” to meet its NDC. They estimate that the current U.S. administration will reduce GHG emissions by 19–30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. The Biden administration was on track to reduce GHG emissions by 29–39 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.

Neither administration has been on track to meet the pledged emissions targets. Yet, the United States is drifting even further from its goal. The Trump administration has slashed environmental and climate policies, including discarding emissions-reduction targets by withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement.

But carbon emissions are just one aspect of a country’s ecological footprint, which also captures the footprint “components” of cropland, grazing land, built-up land, fishing grounds, and forest products. Using this more holistic measure, where can we say the United States is headed? And where does it need to go?

Beyond Emissions Reductions

An economic system designed to grow infinitely on the back of finite natural resources is a recipe for disaster. The ecological footprint enables a broader perspective than GHG-emissions measures, quantifying the relationship between economic activity and overall environmental impact.

Though the U.S. ecological footprint has increased since 1961, since the early 2000s, it has declined then leveled off. (data from the National Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts)

Ecological footprint is the area needed to meet the demands of economic activity. This is measured in a unit called global hectares (gha), which is based on a global-average measure of productivity. The Ecological Footprint Initiative at York University produces ecological footprint data for every country from 1961 to 2025.

The U.S. ecological footprint of consumption was a monstrous 2.45 billion gha in 2025, equating to 7.05 gha per person. This is far beyond the global average ecological footprint of 2.52 gha per person. Since 1961, the U.S. total ecological footprint of consumption has been increasing at an average annual rate of 2.9 percent. There is a silver lining: The U.S. per-person ecological footprint of consumption has been decreasing. In 2000, it stood at 10.6 gha, 50 percent more than in 2025.

Projecting Ecological Footprint into the Future

It’s impossible to predict the future with certainty, but it is beneficial to create projections based on current behaviors. I estimated future ecological footprint values using United Nations (UN) population projections. Assuming the U.S. per-capita footprint declines at its 1961–2025 average rate, it would reach 7.0 gha in 2030 and 6.8 gha in 2050.

Scenario 1 is projected using the historical average between 1961 and 2025, and scenario 2 is projected using the historical average between 2000 and 2025.

In this first scenario, the total ecological footprint would be 2.49 billion gha in 2030 and 2.59 billion gha in 2050. Population growth would drive this increase.

It is important to recognize that the further into the future one projects, the less accurate the projections become. Additionally, the projections can change dramatically if I assume a different growth rate. The U.S. per-capita ecological footprint of consumption has declined more sharply since the 2000s. Assuming it declines at its 2000–2025 average rate, it would reach 6.5 gha in 2030 and 4.8 gha in 2050.

Depending on which assumptions I used, the results varied widely; therefore, they must be approached with caution. Innumerable factors influence the future, especially with ever-more rapid technological advances. While a techno-optimist might say these advances are the key to reducing our footprint, many of them entail more natural resource consumption.

How Far Off Course?

How much would the United States need to decrease its ecological footprint to reach its NDC target of 50 percent of 2005 GHG-emissions levels by 2030? For simplicity, let’s assume decreasing the country’s carbon footprint would entail a proportionate decrease in its other footprint components. After all, these components are deeply intertwined, in terms of source and solution. How effective will emissions reductions be at stopping ecological collapse if we continue to decimate other Earth systems?

The carbon component made up the largest share of the U.S. ecological footprint of consumption per person in 2025.

In 2005, the U.S. total ecological footprint of consumption was 3 billion gha. Cutting this in half by 2030 would require a footprint of 4.25 gha per person, based on UN population projections. Each current and future person in the United States would need to decrease their ecological footprint by 0.5 gha per year from 2026 to 2030. The actual average decrease since 2005 has been 0.17 gha per person per year.

Most of the reduction in ecological footprint would need to come from the carbon component.  In 2025, this component accounted for 62 percent of an individual’s ecological footprint in the United States. What if the United States focused solely on GHG emissions and reduced only its carbon component to 50 percent of 2005 levels? What would the country’s overall ecological footprint look like in 2030?

Is Reducing the Carbon Footprint Enough?

I applied the United States’ NDC pledge only to carbon, projecting the other components according to 1961–2025 trends. In this scenario, total ecological footprint in 2030 would come to almost 2 billion gha, or 5.5 gha per person. Decreasing the carbon component would significantly reduce the ecological footprint. However, in all four scenarios presented, the 2030 U.S. footprint would be above the current world average per-person footprint of 2.52 gha.

Four footprint projections to 2030 based on different assumptions.

While ecological footprint is the area needed to support the demands of economic activity, biocapacity is the area available to support those demands. U.S. biocapacity in 2025 was 3.68 gha per person. In all four scenarios, the country’s ecological footprint would still exceed its biocapacity. At a global scale, the picture is even bleaker: Global biocapacity comes to 1.47 gha per person.

Of course, people across the United States lead different lifestyles, and not everyone needs to reduce their ecological footprint to the same extent. Often, people with higher incomes consume more resources than people with lower incomes. This disproportionate consumption is a climate-justice issue felt between and within countries. Researchers analyzed the relationship between high-income groups’ consumption and extreme climate events. They found that the emissions “of the wealthiest ten percent within the United States and China led to a two- to threefold increase in heat extremes across vulnerable regions such as the Amazon.”

This is why disaggregated ecological footprint assessments are valuable: The results can pinpoint where environmental impact is greatest and what we should change to achieve the greatest reduction. Local ecological footprint assessments are especially useful for identifying behavior changes that reduce an individual’s footprint most effectively.

Reducing Impact and Maintaining Quality of Life

How can the United States cut its ecological footprint in half while maintaining or increasing quality of life? To answer that question, it’s helpful to compare the U.S. footprint-to-wellbeing ratio to that of other countries. The Happy Planet Index does just that, ranking countries based on the ratio of their average life expectancy and wellbeing to their average ecological footprint. The United States is ranked 105^th out of 147 countries. This suggests “that its material and financial resources are not being translated efficiently into sustainable wellbeing for its people.”

Costa Rica ranks first on the Happy Planet Index. (Steve Jurvetson, CC BY 2.0)

U.S. life expectancy is 79.6 years, ranking 36^th among 147 countries. For wellbeing, the Happy Planet Index uses data from a Gallup poll that asks people about their subjective life satisfaction. U.S. wellbeing ranks 18^th out of 147 countries. Clearly, the reason for the United States’ abysmal Happy Planet Index ranking is its ecological footprint of consumption; it ranks 127^th out of 147 countries.

This lack of efficiency in translating wealth into wellbeing indicates that the country needs not only to reduce its resource consumption, but also to redistribute it. Prominent degrowth scholar Jason Hickel argues that GDP growth without redistribution of resources works against social progress, not for it. Ecological economists have found that income and consumption are not the primary factors that enhance quality of life. Instead, quality of life improves with more public services, such as public health programs. Degrowth scholars and activists believe wellbeing can increase when people work less, which some argue also reduces carbon emissions.

This research offers glimmers of hope that it is possible to maintain a happy life while reducing economic activity to within sustainable biological limits. The United States has a long way to go to reduce the national ecological footprint to 50 percent of 2005 levels. And it needs to go even further than that. However, the country is very slowly moving in that direction, as the per-capita ecological footprint decreases. It’s up to civil society—equipped with empirical evidence—to build coalitions that push governments and industry to make the transition toward sustainable wellbeing for all happen faster.

Peri Dworatzek is a senior research scientist at CASSE and a partnership coordinator at the International Ecological Footprint Learning Lab.

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