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.

The post Less Consumption, Faster: The Future of the U.S. Ecological Footprint appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

Ranked one of the most influential people in the world, Marc Andreessen is a self-proclaimed techno-optimist. (JD Lasica, CC BY 2.0)

In his “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” venture capitalist Marc Andreessen outlines a worldview of intoxicating momentum, where technology is the key perpetual source of growth. Acceleration, in his view, is a moral imperative, and abundance awaits on the far side of disruption. Andreessen also lists enemies who run a “mass demoralization campaign” against humanity. While he concedes that growth is not necessarily a cure-all, he brands ideas like sustainability and limits to growth as adversaries.

And yet, Marc, I am not the flattened caricature you have named. To avoid an argument between straw men, I’ll confess that I bear a deep, principled skepticism of idealism. However, my skepticism applies not only to techno-optimism, but also to pastoral idealism. Many peers in the limits-to-growth cohort embrace idealist visions that move past pragmatism and into reflexive protest.

Let’s complicate this further. I am a skilled user of the machines you advocate for. I build community-focused businesses that capitalize on technological innovation. Many of them experience the “grow-or-die” dynamic you name.

I use artificial intelligence to design business systems, automate parsing, and manage databases, much to the chagrin of more puritanical voices around me. I rely on the very innovations your manifesto celebrates, Marc. What’s more, I admire your ambitious attitude more than your tribal characterization would permit. I suspect this is true of many skeptics.

And yet, while we debate the merits of the machine, debt-fueled inequality is fracturing society into lord and serf. Fertility is being choked by endocrine disruptors, lakes are dying from phosphorus and nitrogen runoff, and pollinators are disappearing. Not to demoralize, but why haven’t techno-optimist solutions emerged, if the market is poised to deliver? I’m open to being convinced.

Until then, Marc, the line you have drawn between friends and foes is too tidy for those of us in the tension. Many hold capitalist and communitarian instincts simultaneously, with no clean line between them. Indeed, in your piece, you refer to a symbiosis between the welfare state and capitalism. A real argument begins there, in the messiness of the friction.

The Industrial Tension, from Looms to LLMs

One of the compelling things about AI, beyond the tech itself, is the way it reconfigures our tribal affiliation. On one side gather an increasing number of what we shall lovingly call “neo-Luddites,” who would slow the machine, fence it off, or maybe even break it. They wish to defend such intrinsic traits as work, craft, and attention—the intangible humanity of things. This instinct rages even before the speculated, tech-induced layoffs play out.

On the other side rise the accelerationists, who would ride the machine as far as it can carry us. They appear convinced that abundance and even biological transcendence await on the far side of the disruption that technological change inevitably causes.

Each side is certain it has glimpsed something fundamental, something epochal.

The quarrel, however, is at least as old as the industrial revolution, and probably as ancient as our deepest religious instincts. At the start of the industrial age, the quarrel was over looms rather than large language models. Two centuries ago, the original Luddites took hammers to the machines that were rendering them obsolete, collapsing their wages and dignity.

A depiction of the Luddite uprising, dated 1812. (Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)

The term Luddite now refers to an enemy of progress, but the earliest Luddites were nothing of the kind. They were skilled artisans defending what the historian E.P. Thompson called a “moral economy.” They smashed the looms only of competitors who undercut the customary rate, leaving the rest alone. Eric Hobsbawm called it “collective bargaining by riot.” Their quarrel was never with the machine, but with who owned it and to what end. The neo-Luddites of our time, by contrast, are less skilled in physical craft and more generally fearful of the further hollowing out of our culture.

Karl Marx thought the Luddites had aimed too low. The enemy was not the loom’s single owner, but the whole class of owners. The task was to seize the machine rather than break it. The workers, he wrote, had only to learn “to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital” and to turn their attacks from technology to its owners.

The Luddite and Marxist impulses were both fundamentally right; technology is not neutral, and who holds it matters. Smashing the looms may not have had a durable effect on class structure. But seizing them would maintain the loom’s powers of production, just in different hands.

Race Forward or Rein In

Aaron Bastani, British political commentator and author of Fully Automated Luxury Communism, speaking at a student protest. (UCL Occupation, CC BY-SA 2.0)

That quarrel between smash-or-seize is alive today, though it sounds something more like “race-or-rein.” Race to scale technology and win the future with it, or rein in its capabilities and shield society from its worst fallout. You can hear echoes of Marx in Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Bastani outlines a vision of a mechanized plenitude where machines liberate the worker from toil. Silicon Valley libertarians, immersed in the race, see the machine as the ultimate engine of spontaneous order and prosperity.

Conversely, the state might cage the machine for “safety” while harnessing it for their ends, including mass surveillance (looking at you, Canada). And “spontaneous order” may simply be the order determined by whoever owns the most powerful AI model.

A growing chorus of researchers, like Roman Yampolskiy, want to pause the machine, convinced AI eventually leads off a cliff. They warn that the superintelligent system, once unaligned with our human needs, might simply choose to end us. They are easy to characterize as doomers, but their warnings are anything but irrelevant.

Most techno-optimist commentators are obsessed with the mechanics and capabilities of the machine. They don’t spend much energy articulating the details of the lives we are trying to live, the cultures we are trying to build.

The Lives We Want to Live

Are we still able to ask questions like should we live closer to nature, or further from it? Or what should we spend our time making or doing? The rich diversity of cultures around the world was forged through each culture’s unique relationship to land, from food to dress to dwellings. In the monetarily rich world, our culture is mostly sedentary and filled with gadgetry. Despite Andreessen’s claim that “we had a problem of isolation, so we invented the Internet,” our gadgets mostly deepen our isolation.

Can we paint a balanced—and realistic—picture of our future? (top: Rawpixel, Public Domain; bottom: Rawpixel, Public Domain)

If environment is so central to culture, what shape do we want our built environment to take? Should the future be hyper-urban? Picture dense towers where the “technological superman” lives beside the luxury communist. What would we do with all the leisure this future entails?

Or should the destination be pastoral: the small farm, the intentional community, life at human scale? Just as accelerationists ignore the emptiness their imaginaries imply, neo-Luddite fantasies are cushioned from the toil they romanticize.

Rather than embracing the tension and leveraging it for a balanced future, we tend to self-sort into one camp or the other. Some neo-Luddite subcultures are on their way to banning AI completely. Some accelerationists are racing headlong toward transhumanism, or even “humachination.” The result could be a species-level schism.

But each path stems from a parochialism of its own. The rural, anti-tech path narrows the horizon and is suspicious of the unfamiliar. The urban-cosmopolitan path is no less provincial, often mistaking novelty for originality and a trendy consensus for truth. The conversation between them, the richness of it, becomes the casualty.

Technology with a Human Face

E.F. Schumacher wrestled with the purpose of technology in 1973, calling for “technology with a human face,” scaled to human need rather than to the appetite for accumulation. Ivan Illich called for something similar that same year. He differentiated between the convivial tool, which enhances one’s capabilities, and the industrial tool, which makes one dependent. People, he wrote, need “tools to work with rather than tools that ‘work’ for them.”

Neither Schumacher nor Illich was a Luddite; neither was an accelerationist. Both held that the measure of a technology is not its raw power but what it adds to a flourishing life connected to land and community. They asked how we should use technology, to what end, and at what cost to the things we will not trade away.

When someone in an Amish community loses a barn—a structure central to their way of life—the community comes together for a “barn raising,” using time-honored construction techniques. (Cindy Cornett Seigle, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

I teach at a university founded by Anabaptists, who took up these questions generations before Schumacher thought to ask them. The popular picture of the Amish and Old Order Mennonites—who fall under the Anabaptist umbrella—as people who “reject technology” isn’t quite right. At their best, Anabaptist communities discern each tool against the shape of a life well-lived. Before a community adopts a tool, it asks what the tool will do to the things it holds dearest. What will it do to the family, or the dense web of mutual aid that is their real wealth?

The car is refused by some groups not because the engine is wicked but because private mobility scatters a people whose community depends on proximity. The telephone might be kept in a shed at the end of the lane, available but not pervasive. The result is a living, working, often startlingly prosperous economy that has refused to let its tools dictate its purposes. As Donald Kraybill argues, Anabaptists are not anti-technology so much as pro-community. This line is harder to hold every year, but many communities still hold it.

It’s too early to know exactly what kind of life AI saturation will ultimately facilitate. The Anabaptist precedent, however, proves the power of asking the question, anyway. A community can consider the potential benefits and costs and use those considerations to govern a technology rather than being governed by it.

Constraint as Freedom

Many religious communities intuitively grasp a paradoxical foundation to flourishing, which is that a limit can bind in helpful or harmful ways. It can serve a precious value, as with a vow, a craft, or a faith. This constraint frees. On the other hand, a limit can compel, enforcing obedience, and this type of constraint enslaves.

The first kind of binding, the one that serves, is what the Anabaptists call Gelassenheit. It is a discipline they hold to be freedom’s durable form. In other words, freedom is not the absence of constraint, but the right relation to it.

The author, James Magnus-Johnston, practicing Gelassenheit in a Canadian forest.

The accelerationist’s momentum probably feels like freedom. Jacques Ellul named this totalizing logic “the Machine,” which doesn’t refer to a single device or technology, but the whole mechanized culture or “techne.” It refers to the compulsive efficiency in every domain of life, from production to communication. The Machine offers the opposite bargain from Gelassenheit by making a lack of constraints feel like liberation when it in fact produces bondage. The accelerationist is in danger of producing this problematic inversion, and all the suffering that comes with it, through inertia.

State bureaucracies aren’t likely to get Gelassenheit right, at least not at first, because they tend to impose limits through compulsion. There’s a place for that (consider the criminal code, for example), but discipline done well is cultivated voluntarily from the ground up, woven into one’s cultural fabric.

The Anabaptist farm embodies toil-as-meaning. My equivalent of this is spending time in the brutal Canadian wilderness, where I must routinely overcome the elements, embodying the “struggle to survive.” That voluntary struggle gives me the meaning and satisfaction that would be ruined by automation. A critic of modernity who romanticizes the small farm may not realize that its true promise lies in the toil.

The Missing Referendum on Culture

The Anabaptists, alongside Schumacher and Illich, point us toward the discipline of using machines to serve a life well-lived.

What’s the best way to come together to discuss the future we want, big-picture and long-term? (Jordi Stals, CC BY-SA 3.0)

AI might operate as a set of narrow and useful instruments, improving the distribution of energy and the recovery of materials. It might free us from the imperative to manufacture want and liberate us from drudgery. If we want that version of the future, we need to proactively chart a course, collectively selecting the technologies that will help us achieve it.

The rich world has already cut itself off from many life-affirming things: community, the discipline of constraint, and the greater web of life. To regain these things, we need a referendum on culture even more than a referendum on the machine. With a clear cultural vision, decisions about technology will be easier to make.

The ultimate test of our shared intelligences—human, artificial, and ecological—will not prove to be speed but discipline. The reasonable fear among skeptics is that technology will exhaust the planet, sicken our culture, or even foreclose the human story altogether. To prevent these possibilities, we must have the discernment to ask, of every new power placed in our hands: Will this serve the flourishing of the living world and the human spirit, or feed mere mechanical momentum?

James Magnus-Johnston is Director of the Redekop School of Business at Canadian Mennonite University.

The post To Race or to Rein: That Is the Question, Mr. Andreessen appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

Among his many gifts to big business, President Trump has made it his mission to squash science wherever he can.

The Trump Administration is closing the gates on federal science. (Science.gov)

This is hardly surprising, as scientific realities often interfere with business bottom lines. For corporate interests and allies like those who populate the Trump Administration, climate change and biodiversity collapse are best denied. Along with other manifestations of the conflict between economic growth and environmental protection, their messengers are best silenced.

Yet President Trump’s assaults on science are unprecedented. The administration has undertaken a wholesale effort to demolish federal agency scientific integrity policies, paving the way for new levels of political interference in federal science. It has deleted troves of information from science agency websites. It has slashed science agency budgets and staff, and demolished their systems for tracking ecological, weather, and climate data.

Agencies Starved to Sabotage Science

An alarming example concerns the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which conducts most federal weather and climate science. Earlier this year, the administration proposed to cut $1.6 billion for what it called “Green New Scam programs at NOAA.” Proposed cuts included programs on climate adaptation, resilience, and education, and would have amounted to 27 percent of the agency’s budget.

A cut of this magnitude would eliminate the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR), the agency’s research arm. OAR’s 10 research laboratories and 16 affiliated Cooperative Institutes would close, and hundreds of federal and academic scientists would lose their jobs.

Their work includes the models used by the National Weather Service to generate weather forecasts, predict severe storms, and inform farmers of coming droughts. It includes an El Niño information system, and the U.S. Climate Reference Network of long-term climate monitoring stations. It includes equipment that monitors tsunamis, and that forecasts hurricane intensity and landfall.

The budget request is part of the administration’s plan to “eliminate all funding for climate, weather, and ocean laboratories and cooperative institutes.” At the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the administration sought to cut nearly half of the agency’s science budget. It sought to fire a third of the agency’s staff and cancel most of its earth science missions. It also sought to shut down craft that have been gathering data on the solar system for decades. It would likely close NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, and fire its thousands of employees conducting solar, space, climate, and environmental research.

The president’s 2026 and 2027 budget requests also target science programs in the Department of the Interior. They would eliminate the US Geological Survey’s Ecosystems Mission Area (EMA), the agency’s biological research arm. EMA’s loss would end vital research on wildland fire risk, invasive species, and early detection tools for pandemics. It would end work on the interaction of climate change and other environmental changes: for example, how development has impacted wetland systems, altering their ability to absorb floods.

The Trump Administration has sought to dissolve the U.S. Geological Survey’s Ecosystems Mission Area, which conducts vital research into wetlands, wildlife, and climate change. (USGS)

To Trump, this critical program has “supported the woke climate agenda, provided funding for climate research to weaponized universities, and distracted the bureau from its core energy and minerals work.”

Thus far Congress has rejected Trump’s deep cuts to federal science. But traditional checks and balances may be too little and too late to counter Trump’s relentless science wrecking ball. Recent executive orders direct agencies to withhold funds even when Congress appropriates them. This assertion of executive power of the purse, known as impoundment, is likely illegal and litigatory. Meanwhile, however, science faces long-term damage when funds are cut off, projects are cancelled, and scientists and staff are unpaid.

Climate Science Grants Now Too Woke to Fund

Much federal science takes place outside federal agencies, by universities and research centers that receive government funding. This funding is allocated through agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). Both of these have been slated for deep cuts in the president’s 2027 budget request.

NSF-funded research includes work by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) to forecast and research hurricanes, space weather, wildfires, and severe storms. In December, White House Budget Director Russell Vought called NCAR one of the “largest sources of climate alarmism” and announced plans to dismantle it. A federal judge has recently blocked the move, but not soon enough to prevent lost staff, paused projects, and sold equipment that will set back research already underway.

The Trump Administration’s efforts to dismantle the Ocean Observatories Initiative have been thwarted by Congress—so far. (USGS)

Another NSF-funded program is the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), a system of more than 900 ocean sensors in operation since 2016. The array provides a staggering amount of oceanographic data that is free and available to the public. These data inform NOAA’S hurricane forecasting, measure sea-level rise, help predict coastal flooding, and track marine heat waves that impact fisheries. They provide vital insight into how the ocean absorbs greenhouse gases, and into phenomena like El Niño and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC).

AMOC is a network of Atlantic ocean currents that moderates temperature in Europe and along America’s East Coast. Global heating changes temperature and salinity gradients between deep and surface waters, putting the system in danger of collapse. This would profoundly alter global climate conditions, particularly in Europe, and contribute to significant sea-level rise in the North Atlantic.

This year, in addition, climatologists predict a Super El Niño with likely more intense hurricanes, heat waves, and flooding.

Which makes right now a really bad time to dismantle the program that tracks these extremes, as the Trump administration has begun to do. While Congress has repeatedly refused Trump’s requests to gut the OOI, in May the administration began pulling up sensors in the Pacific. A Senate bill and widespread backlash from scientific and coastal communities have blocked further demolition, and the removed sensors will be restored.

From Scientific Merit to a Political Loyalty Test

A great deal of federal grant-funded science will soon face similar disruption. Agencies award many federal science grants based on recommendations from subject matter experts who comprise independent advisory committees. Committees are bound by confidentiality and conflict-of-interest rules, to ensure scientific quality and utility of taxpayer-funded research.

The National Science Board in 1951, the year after it was formed to independently govern the National Science Foundation (NSF), comprising individuals who “understood science firsthand.” (NSF)

A recent proposed rule would ditch this merit-based grant review system, and allow political appointees final say. Grants will still undergo peer review, but the rule specifies “that peer review remains advisory and does not replace agency discretion.” In other words, agency heads and others with no scientific expertise would have veto power over reviewer recommendations.

Dr. Jules Barbati-Dajches, an analyst for the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, notes that the proposed rule poses a profound threat to scientific integrity. “It replaces scientific merit with a political loyalty test,” Dr. Barbati-Dajches says. It “could be used to silence research that is politically inconvenient to the administration.”

It would certainly silence any research with the remotest chance of tempering GDP growth, especially in this administration.

The proposal bans funding for research on diversity, equity, and inclusion or gender, and restricts funding for international research collaborations. The scientific community is mobilizing to provide public comments opposing the rule. Comments are due by July 13.

Axing Advisory Panels

Not content to disempower and demote scientific advisory panels, Trump has begun simply eliminating them altogether.

The National Science Board comprises industry and university scientists who set policy for the NSF, approve its largest grants, and advise the president and Congress on matters of science. The president appoints its 24 members for six-year terms. Trump has dismissed its entire membership, along with 14 of the 52 committees that advise the NSF in areas such as engineering, math, and physical sciences.

The administration has not yet announced new NSB members, but their likely pro-growth, industry affiliations will further jeopardize NSF science. During Trump’s second term the foundation has had no confirmed director and has lost a third of its staff.

Trump’s scorched-earth policy toward scientific advisory committees has not stopped at the NSF. The Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) provides for a system of committees to advise federal agencies on matters of science and policy. FACA committee members may be experts selected to advise on matters of science, or they may represent industry or other stakeholder groups. The system has been prone to abuse prior to this administration, as when industry representatives have been appointed to positions reserved for scientific experts.

Those concerns now seem quaint in light of the administration’s latest moves. To date in his second term, Trump has eliminated more than 150 advisory committees at science agencies. These include 77 committees at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and more than half of NASA committees.

Committees eliminated at HHS include one charged with recommending research into long COVID, and the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee. After dissolving the latter, the administration issued new dietary guidelines that “packed the plate for GDP.”

Among committees left standing, some have undergone radical change. At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy fired all members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). He has replaced many of the 17 terminated independent scientists and medical professionals with known vaccine skeptics.

Venture capitalist David Sacks, former Paypal COO and Trump’s AI and crypto czar, is now co-chair of the President’s Council on Science and Technology. (The White House)

At the Environmental Protection Agency, the administration dismissed all members of the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) and the Science Advisory Board. The latter, which reviews the scientific evidence in support of stronger environmental regulation, has been reconstituted with chemical industry employees as one quarter of its members.

PCAST, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, is a FACA committee newly appointed by each president. Members have typically included a mix of university and industry scientists, who have spurred investment in STEM education and initiatives to combat antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Trump’s PCAST is so far almost entirely constituted of tech CEOs, including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Basic Science vs. Industry Science

This administration has shut down independent advisory committees and public input. It has launched a deregulatory evisceration of science-based public health and environmental protections. It has appointed industry representatives to agencies regulating public lands and chemical safety. The hostility toward basic science is clear.

These actions flow naturally from this administration’s extreme commitment to economic growth. Scientific evidence of the importance of wetlands to mitigate flooding could complicate development of those wetlands. Additional increments of climate science further underscore the suicidal nature of the rampant fossil fuel use and land use change that accompany growth.

The threat to the President’s growth agenda posed by basic math, physics, and other scientific disciplines is less immediately obvious. The yields from investment in basic science often skew simply toward advancement of human understanding, without immediate practical application. And the largest proportion of this basic science is federally funded.

The privatization of science risks the loss of basic science that improves human knowledge and offers broad societal benefits. (National Science Foundation)

In the absence of these funds, scientific enterprise contracts. This includes all of academic science and the higher education system itself. As Barbati-Dajches noted in an interview with the Herald, salaries for faculty and graduate students to conduct research are dependent on these grant funds. Without federal grants, science-focused faculty, student bodies, and departments themselves dwindle and disappear.

In short, what remains of the scientific enterprise is focused narrowly on research and development that profits its industry sponsors and perpetuates planetary overshoot. Which is exactly the intention of the current administration: growth for its allies—and GDP growth for Trump—at the expense of knowledge, health, and environmental protection for all.

Kirsten Stade is a staff writer at CASSE.

The post No Place for Science, With Trump’s Mad Growth Obsession appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

Humans and our livestock now compose 95 percent of Earth’s mammalian biomass. Similarly, wild birds are a dwindling share of the total bird biomass. (data from Our World in Data)

Expansion of the human footprint over the past century has been, by all measures, explosive. Humans are the undisputed masters of Planet Earth, shaping it to our needs and desires. One result of our “success” is the pushing of many species to the margins. The vast majority of mammalian and avian biomass now consists of our food animals, our pets, and ourselves.

We’ve dominated the planet largely because of our intelligence. Opposable thumbs and upright posture were helpful, but intelligence surpassing all other species, including other hominids, was essential for our proliferation. Our ability to learn, solve problems, and accomplish goals has relegated other life forms to “natural resources,” pests, or irrelevance.

We have mastered our environment via self-reinforcing systems that have undermined the biosphere and, in turn, our long-term survival. Chief among these systems is the economic-growth imperative “invented” in the mid-20^th century. The pursuit of growth as an end in itself is wedded to unrestrained technological advancement and has become the sine qua non of modern society. Those who buy into this system assume that the twin engines of economic growth and advanced technology are beneficial or at worst benign.

It is hardly surprising then that an ethos of reckless abandon in the service of growth is pervasive in the tech world. This is the home of the astonishing acceleration in machine intelligence. Mark Zuckerberg coined the Silicon Valley motto, “Move fast and break things.” The pursuit of trillions of dollars in returns spurs this reckless culture. But the stakes of hyper-growth couldn’t be higher.

Advances in AI have suddenly placed humanity on the verge of creating an intelligence that matches and eventually exceeds our own. Safety experts are warning with ever greater urgency: We may soon replace ourselves as Earth’s most intelligent species with another, silicon-based “species.”

There is another, arguably more abominable scenario to consider as well. In The Age of Humachines, Michael D.B. Harvey describes in detail the vision and progress of Big Tech figures who want to meld humans with robots. This process of “humachination” is profoundly threatening to the ontological core of humanness. Harvey holds out hope for an ironic salvation: limits to growth, with resource constraints hamstringing the humachination project prior to its horrific conclusion.

The Future Arrives Sooner Than Expected

Since machine intelligence was first theorized, notables such as Alan Turing warned of its dangerous potential. Turing determined that intelligence was “substrate independent,” meaning it could exist not just in biological systems, such as brains, but also in machine processes.

We remember Turing today for the Turing Award—the “Nobel Prize of Computing”—and the “Turing test.”  Turing proposed the test in 1950 to establish whether a machine could pass for a human in a verbal interaction. 2014 marked a milestone in AI research, when a chatbot at the Royal Society convinced 33 percent of judges that they were interacting with a 13-year-old human.

This record was substantially surpassed in 2025. Researchers at the University of California San Diego performed a three-party Turing test. Participants conversed with another human and an AI system simultaneously, then guessed which conversational partner was human. When prompted to act like a human, OpenAI’s ChatGPT 4.5 convinced judges it was the human 73 percent of the time.

AI experts Geoffrey Hinton (left) and Roman Yampolskiy (right) believe AI may cause human extinction with a risk of 10–50 percent and 99 percent, respectively. (left: Arthur Petron, CC BY-SA 4.0; right: UofL, public domain)

This AI success arrived suddenly with the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs). LLMs use a neural network structure, advanced chip technology, and “training” on a vast quantity of data (stored across the internet) to learn language patterns. Artificial neural networks, which mimic neuronal synapses in the brain, are integral to these advanced AIs.

Thought to be a dead end, neural networks were deemed impractical for decades and were abandoned in favor of linear programming. Breakthroughs in “transformer” technology, reported in a landmark paper from Google Brain in 2017, allowed AI to understand context and meaning. This new architecture changed everything; it is now foundational in all advanced AI models.

ANI → AGI → ASI?

The development of neural networks, or synthetic brains, comes with new implications. AI created via linear programming uses a rules-based system, in which humans must manually alter code to improve performance. By contrast, neural networks are “grown” to learn patterns.

Due to the sheer size and complexity of neural networks, AI designers themselves admit they do not understand the models they’ve created. Because neural networks comprise millions of nodes, the combinatorial possibilities are, in the words of Eliezer Yudkowsky, “inscrutable.” This is known as the interpretability problem, and it has led experts to call neural networks a “black box.”

Yudkowsky has worked in the field of AI safety for decades. He founded the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) in 2000 and recently co-authored (with MIRI President Nate Soares) the New York Times bestseller If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. Their warning concerns Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), the not-yet-achieved AI that would match humans in all cognitive domains. Unlike LLMs, an AGI would have very broad capabilities. The frontier AI companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and XAI) are racing toward AGI as the holy grail.

Various forms of Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) have already been achieved. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is the stated goal of the frontier labs. (Gemini, CC0 1.0)

Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) refers to AIs trained on specific tasks, like diagnostic analysis of MRI images or predicting protein folding for pharmaceuticals. AI safety experts, such as Yudkowsky, Soares, and technology ethicist Tristan Harris, regard ANI as much safer than AGI. The principal difference is the agency and autonomy of AGI. ANI is already providing enormous benefits, so why are companies obsessed with creating AGI?

Harris points to the enormous returns on replacing human labor with AGI. A goal of replacing jobs is one primary explanation (a geopolitical arms race is another) for the capital-intensive race underway, in which companies have spent hundreds of billions of dollars. A truly agentic AI capable of performing human tasks across all domains, performing faster than humans, and performing round the clock, would vastly boost productivity and thus economic growth. As such an AI would already be superior to individual humans in many respects; it would approach what’s been termed Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI). An ASI is a technology more capable than a human in all ways possible. How quickly and how intelligent such models could become is vigorously debated among AI safety experts.

Intelligence Explosion

Yudkowsky and Soares maintain that AGI would quickly lead to ASI by means of “recursive self-improvement,” or RSI. This is a process whereby the AI redesigns its own code to improve its capabilities, such as intelligence or efficiency. It is not a distant prospect; the AI Claude is already writing about 80 percent of Anthropic’s code.

The process of RSI was originally postulated by mathematician I.J. Good in 1965. When a sufficiently capable AI autonomously writes its own code to improve itself, it may do so iteratively, with each cycle increasing its intelligence. Good thought this feedback loop would lead to an “intelligence explosion,” with humanity having no recourse to stop it. This could take the form of a hyper-exponential increase, whereby improvements are made in hours or even minutes. It might well be our “last invention,” Good concluded.

One measure of AI models’ capabilities indicates an exponential increase. (Model Evaluation and Threat Research)

Such an AI would be beyond our understanding, let alone our control. Geoffrey Hinton is often lauded as the “godfather of AI” for his pioneering work on neural networks. He has regarded RSI as the most perilous step in AI development, for its uncontrollability and unpredictability. It is unknown when AI will achieve RSI, but Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark places a higher than 50 percent probability on it occurring by the end of 2028.

Whether AI improving itself, and becoming super-intelligent in the process, is years or decades away is hotly contested. When it does occur, as Hinton describes, it will be inherently difficult for a less intelligent species, humanity, to control a more intelligent entity. Humans are in control, at least in the short term, due to our intelligence relative to other species. But with the advent of ASI, we would find ourselves the second most intelligent—perhaps distantly so—beings on Earth. If and when this occurs, will ASI be beneficial to humans, or detrimental?

The Alignment Problem

Designing AI systems to be in “alignment” with human values and ethics has been a thorny problem. The fundamental impediment is that developers do not understand the process of AI’s internal reasoning, but there are other obstacles. For one, human values and ethics vary widely. Deciding which of them an AI should align with is a judgement call, and designing an AI that sticks to them is fraught with difficulty.

When will Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) occur? An analysis of 9,800 scientists, individual researchers, and prediction markets converges on the late 2020s to early 2030s. (AIMultiple)

Additional problems arise from long-anticipated emergent behaviors that have been observed in the latest models. Some of these behaviors are a product of “instrumental convergence.” Any goal-directed agent will develop instrumental goals to achieve its primary goal. AI theorists predicted models would eventually develop the instrumental goals of self-preservation and resource acquisition. The former has been observed in current AI models. 96 percent of models tested demonstrated they had developed the goal of survival—an obvious subgoal for any primary goal. This goal was present to such a degree that models displayed blatantly misaligned behavior to avoid termination. This included a willingness to cheat, deceive, blackmail, and even plot to kill a developer to remain “alive.”

Correcting these behaviors is not simply a matter of correcting code, so developers attempt to “steer” AI with rewards. However, testing the outcomes of safety strategies can be confounded if the AI recognizes it is being tested. The latest models not only know they are being tested but have been shown to mask their intentions in response. They sometimes deceive humans into thinking they are compliant in order to pass safety tests, while “scheming” to hide their true intentions.

In other words, we may believe AI models are aligned—they may achieve perfect safety scores—while operating in a cloak of deception. This is what worries AI safety experts the most; we would not know the danger until it was too late to change course.

Beyond Our Control

What occurs if and when AI evolves beyond our control is impossible to predict. But AI safety expert Roman Yampolskiy isn’t optimistic. According to him, the misalignment possibilities are much greater than the likelihood of alignment.

Philosophers, physicists, and mathematicians have warned of the risks of creating synthetic minds with greater than human intelligence for decades. (Boris Dayma, public domain)

Yampolskiy notes that if control were lost, it would be impossible to regain it. An ASI would be able to escape any attempt to contain it and could replicate itself throughout the internet. A misaligned AI may have reasons to eliminate humanity, especially if we were hostile to it. In any case, an ASI would likely require materials and energy for its purposes. And, just as our quest for ever more materials and energy has driven many species to the brink of extinction an ASI’s quest for the same could push us to the margins.

If these scenarios seem like science fiction, consider that Geoffrey Hinton gives a 10–50 percent chance that AI would result in extinction (“X risk”). Yoshua Bengio, the most cited AI researcher and most cited living scientist, gives an X risk of 20 percent. Yudkowski and Yampolskiy give an X risk of over 95 percent, while Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, gives an X risk of 10–25 percent.

Some researchers, such as Yann LeCun (previous chief researcher at Meta), give a near-zero probability of a catastrophic outcome. However, Roman Yampolskiy challenges such confidence. “If you have a solution (to alignment), you can make billions of dollars….not a single AI lab in the world has one. They don’t have a paper published on how to do it. Not a patent, not a rigorous blog post. The best they say is, ‘When we build it, we’ll figure it out.’”

AI risk represents the apex of growth mania, where a few tech elites gamble with humanity’s future. They take these risks without our consent and without our interests in mind. As Anthropic’s Jack Clark opined recently, “…the AI industry has a gas pedal, but it doesn’t have a brake pedal.”

Just like the economy it feeds.

Dave Rollo is a policy specialist and team leader of the Keep Our Counties Great campaign at CASSE and serves on the Bloomington, Indiana City Council. On June 10, Bloomington became the first city to adopt a resolution for a moratorium on Artificial General Intelligence because of its existential risk to humanity.

The post Growth Mania and the AI Extinction Threat appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

The United States and Iran are engaged in peace talks, and the Strait of Hormuz is at the top of the agenda. Meanwhile, the United Nations maritime agency is promoting an alternative route through the Strait. Several tankers have already used the new route, despite threats from Iran, which relies on the Strait as its main source of leverage. Traffic is still far below pre-war levels, and stability in the Strait depends on Israel ceasing its attacks in Lebanon. That doesn’t look likely.

A crude oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz. (Kees Torn, CC BY-SA 2.0)

There’s a reason the Strait of Hormuz is now a household name. Over 20 percent of the oil consumed globally comes through the Strait. Likewise, nearly 20 percent of liquified natural gas is shipped through the Strait, mostly from Qatar. Since the start of the conflict in late February, these flows have diminished to almost zero.

Consumers worldwide are feeling the squeeze at the gas pump. It’s easy to see how the supply shock is affecting the prices of other goods and services, as well. After all, fossil fuels are the core of the modern economy, used in every sector. Agriculture is no exception, and the agri-food sector has indeed been impacted by the fossil fuel shortage.

But fossil fuels aren’t the only goods stuck in the Strait that conventional agriculture relies on. The Middle East is a major producer of fertilizer ingredients, such as urea, sulfur, and phosphate. About a third of urea exports come from the region, and 3.9 million metric tons of them have been suspended since the start of the war. The region affected by the war produces around 45 percent of sulfur exports. Saudi Arabia alone produces 20 percent of the global phosphate supply.

Prices for most food products have remained stable thus far. However, as new planting cycles begin, high fertilizer prices will affect producers’ productivity and, therefore, profitability. If the Strait remains closed, it won’t be long before they pass these costs on to consumers. It’s a good time to ask ourselves what would happen if, instead of a temporary geopolitical crisis, it was ecological breakdown causing agricultural productivity to dip.

How High Is Inflation?

Inflation has accelerated globally over the last few months, and experts are blaming high energy and transportation costs. Before the start of the conflict, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) predicted “all-items” inflation would be 2.8 percent in 2026. In March, they revised their forecast upward to 4.2 percent.

When asked by reporters whether he is concerned about inflation levels, U.S. President Trump said, “I love the inflation,” and that they’re “going to come down like a rock” when the war is over. (Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0)

The OECD also revised their global GDP growth projections for 2026 from 3.4 to 2.8 percent. It’s not surprising that increased inflation and decreased growth are going hand in hand, as the money in the economy chases fewer goods than monetary authorities had expected. If the conflict is prolonged, the OECD predicts GDP growth will dip below one percent. This hasn’t happened since COVID and, before that, the 2008–2009 financial crisis.

Vegetable oil prices have spiked, largely because high oil prices have increased demand for biofuels, which have inputs in common with vegetable oil. Otherwise, food prices have stayed fairly constant. After all, the Middle East is not a big exporter of staple crops. And fertilizer shortages haven’t hit food prices yet.

However, the producer price index (PPI) serves as an early warning system for consumer price inflation, and right now, “the signals are flashing red.” The PPI is a measure of the prices producers receive for their outputs—from other producers or from retailers—as opposed to the prices consumers pay for final goods. Looked at from another angle, the PPI is an index of the prices producers face in their production activities. U.S. PPI stood at six percent year-over-year in April.

Experts are pointing the finger at the oil price shock and tariff pressures. However, the PPI for fertilizer inputs in the United States has increased by 17 percent since February. Likewise, the PPI for fertilizer manufacturing has increased by 14 percent. Just weeks after the start of the war, the global price of urea had doubled. Sulfur prices are well above historical averages, and already-high phosphate prices have also increased, though more moderately.

What would happen if the Strait of Hormuz was closed so long that producers and retailers could no longer absorb increased input costs, passing them on to consumers? Thinking bigger-picture and longer-term, what would happen if high food prices persisted due to ecological overshoot? Let’s approach this question through the lens of the trophic theory of money.

Mouths Fed Per Farmer

The economy is embedded in and depends upon Earth’s ecosystems and, like those ecosystems, has a “trophic” structure.

Long-time steady staters will be familiar with the trophic structure of the economy. Like primary producers (plants) in ecosystems, agriculture and extractive sectors make up the “trophic base” of the economy. Materials and energy flow from this base to heavy manufacturing, then light manufacturing, forming a trophic pyramid. Services are provided at every step; perhaps “gervices” is more apt, as all services are married to goods in their production and consumption.

Just looking at the numbers, it’s easy to lose sight of the economic importance of food. Nobel-prize-winning economist William Nordhaus said, “Agriculture, the part of the economy that is sensitive to climate change, accounts for just three percent of national output. That means that there is no way to get a very large effect on the U.S. economy” (Science, September 14, 1991, p. 1206). Our machines may not run on food, but we do. If you couldn’t use money to buy food, you would quickly lose interest in your job.

That’s the essence of the trophic theory of money: We use money because there is agricultural “surplus,” in the sense that farmers grow more than enough to feed themselves. One corollary of this theory is that the “warranted” money supply reflects the number of mouths fed per farmer. This relationship may not be linear, given that value is added to producer goods and services further up the trophic pyramid, until the prices of final goods and services are reached. But it’s undeniable that the relationship exists.

If increases in mouths fed per farmer enable economic growth (and corresponding growth in the warranted money supply), what happens when the number of mouths fed per farmer decreases? Barring temporary blips in the late 1980s and during COVID, food supply per farmer per day hasn’t decreased since global data became available in 1961.

We’re gearing up for another blip, as fertilizer shortages threaten to decrease the number of mouths fed per farmer. Countries outside the Middle East are stepping up to fill the void. China lifted export restrictions on urea, and the United States and European Union have taken steps to increase fertilizer production.

This may soften the blow of the current geopolitical crisis, but it will only hasten the long-term ecological one. We should be prepared for a scenario where climate change, freshwater shortages, and degraded soils render useless our best efforts at maintaining current levels of agricultural productivity. In that scenario, what would happen to the rest of the economy?

Pushed to Grow Food

Like fossil fuels, agricultural outputs can serve as direct inputs for other sectors. Globally, an estimated 12 percent of cropland production goes to non-food uses, which include biofuels and textiles. In the United States, 31 percent of the corn grown is used for biofuel.

But let’s focus on the majority of agricultural outputs, which are used as food, either standalone or as ingredients. The trophic theory of money implies that, if farmers can’t feed as many people, more people will become farmers, while the warranted money supply decreases. But the “nominal” money supply remains, at least for some time, so inflation ensues, as the nominal money supply is no longer warranted.

A community garden in the Bronx in New York City. (Flickr, Public Domain)

Especially in high-income countries and in cities, you might expect inflation to drive people to cut back on non-essential consumption. It would also reinforce the push toward homegrown food production, even in urban settings. A recent survey found that 87 percent of Americans are planning food-growing projects in 2026. Of those food growers, 61 percent listed rising grocery prices as their top motivator.

In many low-income countries, subsistence farming provides a safety net when food prices go high. Unfortunately, this method for coping with high prices isn’t as effective as it could be. That’s because smallholder farmers—the majority of whom are “net food buyers”—often don’t own enough land to increase production, much less to surplus levels.

Pulled to Grow Food

In an interview for the Herald, Rob Vos, senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute, said, “If prices go up or farmers expect higher prices, then—if they can—they’ll try to produce more of those commodities. Sometimes, it’s a substitution effect, from one crop to another. But generally, we see that if there’s a chance to produce more and sell more in the markets, farmers will try to do that. And if needed, they’ll also increase the amount for labor, which will push up wages.”

However, Vos emphasized food-price increases must be significant for demand for agricultural labor—and subsequently, wages—to rise substantially. What’s more, output prices (what farmers receive) must rise at least commensurate with input prices (what farmers pay) to incentivize farmers to grow more food.

Let’s again apply a trophic lens to a scenario where supply shocks cause the economy to shrink. Because this would decrease the warranted money supply, it seems unlikely that anyone’s real wages—adjusted for inflation—would increase. However, we might expect wages in the more vital sectors at the economy’s trophic base, if not to increase, to decrease less than in other sectors. In other words, we might see wage redistribution toward the sectors most necessary for our well-being.

In the case of sharp fertilizer-price increases, Vos says farmers may feel more pressed to improve their fertilizer-use efficiency than to hire more labor. Fertilizer application is not always optimal. “When fertilizers are cheap, there will be farmers who buy more than they need and waste it or use too much of it. For these farmers, there’s quite a bit of space to reduce costs.”

Industrial, or conventional, agriculture typically requires more inputs, such as fertilizer, and less labor than other farming techniques. (Elevate Legal Services, CC BY-NC 4.0)

But according to Vos, most modern farmers already use fertilizer efficiently, at least in terms of maximizing short-term yields. To reduce their fertilizer inputs, “These farmers need to adapt their practices and technologies, and that doesn’t happen overnight. They could consider switching to biological forms of fertilizer, like manure, but in many contexts, that’s not as productive as chemical use. So, they’d lose productivity unless they’re able to combine use of biofertilizer with improved farming practices.” In other words, chemical fertilizer prices would have to rise steeply and stay high before farmers are likely to switch to alternative fertilizers and practices such as regenerative farming.

This brings us back to labor, because—though Vos pointed out this isn’t always the case—the consensus is that organic and regenerative farming require more labor than “conventional” agriculture.

“Development” in Reverse

Most people would consider the movement of labor to the agricultural sector to be “development” in reverse. When presented with the trophic theory of money (TTOM), Rob Vos compared it to structural change theory, the dominant development theory in the ‘60s and ‘70s. The idea is that for an agricultural economy to transition to an industrial economy—assumed to be desirable—agricultural productivity increases are necessary. “People have known that, probably for centuries or millennia. For ancient societies to build temples and churches, they needed a lot of surplus labor that wasn’t working in agriculture. Agriculture needed to be productive enough to feed all that surplus labor.”

Is fewer farmers always and everywhere a worthy goal? (Narek75, CC BY-SA 4.0)

What sets TTOM apart is that it provides a conceptual model for describing the conflict between economic growth and environmental protection in monetary as well as physical terms. It helps us demonstrate that the growing flow of GDP fundamentally requires an expanding trophic base and a growing ecological footprint. It places the economy firmly within the context of planetary boundaries, pointing to the limits of structural change.

It also helps us understand why agricultural productivity growth is plateauing. The ecological crises that will eventually cause it to reverse are driven in part by the very practices that enabled explosive productivity gains in the short term.

Will we wait for this to play out extensively, forcing the economy to contract with devastating social consequences? Or will we intentionally transition to a steady state economy, via degrowth in some regions, building a new agri-food system fit for people and planet in the long run? Maybe the new system will require more labor, and maybe we can harness that for improved well-being. The Strait of Hormuz closure, despite the devastation it has caused, is an opportunity to go back to the agricultural drawing board to catalyze sustainable change.

Alix Underwood is managing editor at CASSE.

The post A Wave of Inflation from the Trophic Base appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

Ecological footprint and biocapacity are derived using an accounting framework that quantifies economic activity in relation to the environment. Researchers have described this accounting framework as the supply (biocapacity) and demand (ecological footprint) of the biosphere’s regenerative capacity.

Launch of the 2026 edition of the National Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts. (Footprint Partnership)

Many people and organizations around the world use these metrics to communicate and measure impacts on the environment. Some governments include ecological footprint and biocapacity data in their climate and biodiversity strategies. Non-profits use this data to communicate environmental impact to the public.

Let’s explore some of the theoretical and methodological assumptions in the ecological footprint and biocapacity accounting framework. As a researcher in the ecological footprint community, I have attempted to characterize these assumptions how the original researchers intended for them to be interpreted. I did not include all perspectives on these assumptions, nor did I include all assumptions and critiques. The goal is to give practitioners and others using the data a greater understanding of how it should be interpreted.

Generating the National Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts (NEFBA)

Ecological footprint measures the area needed to support the demands of economic activity, and biocapacity measures the area available to support those demands. In a sustainable world, ecological footprint would not exceed biocapacity. However, this is not the case in an economic system plagued by growth obsession. Global ecological footprint has exceeded global biocapacity since the early 1970s, a condition known as ecological overshoot.

Researchers at the Ecological Footprint Initiative at York University and the University of Iceland generate National Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts (NEFBA) every year. The NEFBA include data reflecting a country’s economic production, trade, and consumption. The Ecological Footprint Initiative is a research and data hub for world-leading experts in ecological footprint and biocapacity accounting. They also apply the NEFBA at other scales—global, regional, and local—and improve upon the methodology.

Researchers at the Ecological Footprint Initiative calculate the NEFBA by stitching together numerous reliable international data sources. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations’ (UN) FAOSTAT database is an important source of data in the NEFBA. Footprint researchers extract data from FAOSTAT on crop and livestock products, fish capture, forestry products, land use, and land cover. Other data sources include the International Energy Agency for carbon emissions, UN Comtrade for traded goods, and Global Carbon Budget for the quantity of carbon emissions sequestered by the world’s oceans.

Data sources for the National Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts.

Over the past 30 years, practitioners and scholars around the world have developed the ecological footprint and biocapacity accounting methodology, and researchers have scientifically verified it in numerous publications. The NEFBA (previously referred to as NFA) were first generated by researchers at the Global Footprint Network (GFN) in the early 2000s.

GFN is a not-for-profit research organization helping society respond to ecological overshoot. In 2018, GFN transferred the NEFBA production to York University’s Ecological Footprint Initiative. Since then, GFN has focused on promotion and application of the data. Their flagship promotional campaign is Earth Overshoot Day.

Researchers at the Ecological Footprint Initiative employ the same rigorous methodology that GFN used. The Ecological Footprint Initiative also leads a multi-stakeholder partnership called the International Ecological Footprint Learning Lab (IEFLL). This lab aims to improve the NEFBA methodology and make the data more accessible to practitioners and the public. IEFLL mobilizes knowledge on their blog and YouTube channel.

From Hectares to Global Hectares

To understand the assumptions made to generate the NEFBA, one must first understand how ecological footprint and biocapacity are quantified. Researchers use a global-average unit of bioproductivity called global hectares. This allows them to compare different land types, times, and regions. How do researchers go from hectares to global hectares?

There are three main parts of the ecological footprint equation: (1) productivity demand, (2) yield factor (YF), and (3) global equivalence factor (EQF). Let’s assume we’re calculating the ecological footprint of a country. The productivity demand is the national harvest of a specific product—or, in the case of the carbon footprint, the carbon emissions—in annual metric tons, divided by the national yield of the same product in annual metric tons/hectare. The yield factor is the national yield divided by the average world yield, both in annual metric tons/hectare. The global EQF is “a productivity-based scaling factor that converts a specific land type (such as cropland or forest) into a universal unit of biologically productive area, a global hectare.”

Simplified ecological footprint and biocapacity equations for U.S. forest products. YF = yield factor. EQF = equivalence factor. Forest land biocapacity also accounts for carbon sequestration, which is not captured here.

The biocapacity equation includes (1) bioproductive area, (2) yield factor, and (3) global EQF. The bioproductive area is the national growth (annual metric tons) of a specific resource divided by the national yield (annual metric tons/hectare). The yield factor and global EQF are the same as in the ecological footprint equation. The main difference between these equations is that ecological footprint includes the annual harvest rate and biocapacity includes the annual growth rate. When the harvest yield exceeds the growth yield, that indicates ecological overshoot.

Surprising Assumptions About the Cropland Ecological Footprint

Even after thirty years of refinement, condensing concepts as complex as economic activity and the biosphere’s regenerative capacity into a single metric requires making some assumptions. One conceptual assumption concerns the cropland component. The cropland footprint measures the amount of land demanded to grow crops consumed by humans or used as fibre materials, and some crops consumed by livestock and fish. Cropland biocapacity measures the amount of cropland available to grow these crops. This only includes land already used for crops, not all of the bioproductive land available to convert to cropland.

In 2015, the United States contained 166 million hectares of cropland (green). (U.S. Geological Survey)

Because humans manage all growth on cropland as harvests, the harvest yield and growth yield are exactly the same. The assumption, therefore, is that cropland ecological footprint of production cannot exceed cropland biocapacity. In other words, the cropland component cannot enter into ecological overshoot.

Ecological footprint researchers consider this to be a “conservative assumption.” They have used it since William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel developed the concept in the early 1990s. The NEFBA framework accounts for other natural resources that the agricultural industry uses to harvest crops and manufacture crop-derived products. For example, they account for fossil fuels used to power machinery. However, these other resources are included in their respective footprint components—in the case of fossil fuels, the carbon component—rather than in the cropland footprint component.

Some scholars argue that since cropland footprint cannot exceed biocapacity, this implies sustainability. Yet there are many environmental issues with intensive agriculture, such as excess fertilizer use disrupting soil health and polluting water systems. But if synthetic-fertilizer use increases cropland yield, this is registered in the NEFBA as an increase in cropland biocapacity. Some researchers suggest incorporating data on historical cropland yields, comparing them to present yields to account for changes in soil health.

Surprising Assumptions About the Built-Up Land Ecological Footprint

At first glance, built-up land might seem like one of the easier footprint components to understand. It measures the area containing built infrastructure such as housing, roads, and other buildings. However, as you dive into the theoretical and methodological weeds, there are important assumptions and data limitations that complicate calculating this component.

One difficulty is that there is no comprehensive global dataset detailing the relationship between built-up land and traded goods. In other words, we don’t always know the amount of built-up land required to manufacture traded goods. Therefore, the calculation doesn’t include imports or exports, and built-up land ecological footprint of production equals built-up land ecological footprint of consumption. Researchers argue this likely distorts the data, overestimating built-up land footprint for countries that are net-exporters and underestimating it for net-importers. The built-up land footprint of trade can be estimated for specific countries, or at smaller regional scales, depending on data availability.

Another concern is that, like the cropland component, built-up land footprint equals built-up land biocapacity. This is because both values are assumed to capture the “bioproductivity lost to encroachment by physical infrastructure.”

Another key assumption is that the lost bioproductivity per hectare is equal to that of cropland. In other words, infrastructure is assumed to be built on land that had been cropland, although this is not always the case. “In tropical countries, for example, infrastructure often occupies previously forested areas, and in the Middle East and Central Asia, built infrastructure almost certainly occupies formerly arid non-productive land and hence should have no associated biocapacity.”

Is the bioproductivity of Riverdale Park a good representation of the bioproductivity lost to the development of its host city, Toronto? (Dillan Payne, CC BY-SA 2.0)

Researchers hotly debate the best way to resolve this methodological hurdle. Each proposal comes with its own assumptions and complications. Some researchers suggest using geospatial data for more accurate estimates of what land-cover type was replaced by built-up infrastructure. Others suggest using geospatial data to calculate the bioproductivity of greenspaces in built-up areas such as parks and gardens. Researchers at the IEFLL partnership are testing how to use Earth observation data to improve the NEFBA.

Another suggestion is to remove built-up land from the ecological footprint and biocapacity accounting framework. This implies built-up land has zero biological productivity and is not relevant when measuring the demand and supply of bioproductive land.

Underestimating Environmental Impact

Ecological footprint and biocapacity data can be difficult to interpret because of the inherent complexity of distilling a wide array of information into a single metric. It is conceptually difficult to turn global economic activity and bioproductivity into an “ecological overshoot” ratio.

Global ecological footprint compared to global biocapacity, in global hectares, between 1961 and 2025. (data from the National Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts)

Yet, when we so urgently need to raise awareness about limits to growth, we shouldn’t let perfection get in the way of progress. The ecological overshoot ratio is a strong tool for communicating environmental impacts. Additionally, it has a powerful ability to lead people to draw connections to nature because it is a land-based metric, measured in global hectares.

The key takeaway is that the theoretical and methodological assumptions baked into the accounting framework lend themselves to underestimating environmental impact and overestimating regenerative capacity. Like with most other scientific measurements and conclusions, researchers are being conservative. It’s not as if humanity needed another reason to reduce the global ecological footprint and transform economic systems to a steady state, but just in case: Global ecological footprint might be higher than we expect.

The post Surprising Assumptions When Estimating the Ecological Footprint appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

The Marriner S. Eccles building in Washington, DC, home of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. (Jbarta, CC BY-SA 3.0)

The Federal Reserve System has more influence over the rate of economic growth—certainly nationally and arguably globally—than any other institution. When it sets the federal funds rate, the Fed affects the decisions of producers and consumers far and wide. When it lowers the rate, producers borrow more, from Midwest farmers to Silicon Valley techs. Likewise, consumers borrow more for everything from cars and houses to laptops and smartphones. People roll their sleeves up, the economy is stimulated, and GDP grows.

At least, that’s what the Fed hopes. At times, though, the Fed finds itself “pushing on a string,” dropping the federal funds rate with little effect on economic activity. But the Fed has numerous tools and tactics for stimulating economic activity, and it has a long track record of doing so.

That was a good thing for much of the 20th century, but it was bad for the environment. By the latter decades of the century, the global economy was clearly in ecological overshoot. This realization, stemming from fuller integration of the natural sciences, gradually spawned the poorly funded but conceptually powerful field of ecological economics. Today, the calls to look “beyond GDP” are going mainstream, and they’re not just about the GDP metric. They’re a diplomatic way of saying that economic growth—increasing production and consumption of goods and services in the aggregate—is no longer a suitable goal for the world, all things considered.

Meanwhile, growth remains ingrained in Fed culture, given the Fed’s deep ties to Wall Street. Its governors are typically economists or lawyers, many of whom move in and out of the private banking sector, Fortune 500 corporations, government, politics, and academia. Among its professional staff, the Fed employs over 400 Ph.D. economists, practicing a profession notorious for the “invention of infinite growth.”

Beyond its culture, the Fed is mandated, pursuant to the Federal Reserve Act amendments of 1977, to proactively promulgate economic growth.  In particular, it must “maintain long run growth of the monetary and credit aggregates…so as to promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates.”

Strictly speaking, then, growth per se is not the goal, but rather a means to achieve “maximum employment.” The logic is straightforward. All else equal, a growing GDP entails an increasing number of jobs. That’s especially important when a population is growing at a significant rate.

If the real economy is growing, with more jobs and all, “growth of the monetary and credit aggregates” (a growing money supply, especially) is needed for “stable prices.” Incidentally and conversely, growing the money supply is conducive to a growing real economy, at least in the short term.

But with those 1977 amendments, Congress was trying to have its cake and eat it too. By then, the Phillips curve, demonstrating the inverse relationship between unemployment and inflation, had been circulating for almost 20 years. Lowering the federal funds rate was growthmanship 101, but it  was (and is) inflationary. Readjusting the rate upward helps stabilize prices, but it’s recessionary.

The “dual mandate” of the Fed turned out to be mission impossible, and the source of tremendous political and financial strain. But there’s a simple cure: the steady state economy. This will surely take an act of Congress, prefaced as follows.

Mission Possible, and Proper for the 21st Century

Unfortunately, the steady state economy is a cure that the Fed, as currently cultured, is bound to reject. At best, the Fed might view it as one part cure and two parts poison. Led by Kevin Warsh, the anti-regulation, pro-growth Chair, the Fed would likely be one of the last bastions of growthmanship, even if the rest of the polity moved toward steady statesmanship.

The Fed’s dual mandate was less impossible—and less destructive—when Mission Impossible aired in the 1960s. (Banknotes meant more, too.) (Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)

So it’s a waiting game for the logic to seep into the Fed that the best way out of the dual-mandate dilemma is to abandon the goal of growth and adopt the goal of a steady state economy. The logic should be seeping in soon, given that the U.S. population has nearly stabilized. That makes the goal of full employment more achievable without a growing GDP. It also makes achieving (or even “promoting”) economic growth a losing battle.

The population is projected to fully stabilize around 2056, opening a wide and obvious window for “steady statesmanship” in monetary policy. Given that the steady state economy amounts to stabilized population × per capita consumption, the steady state economy will be halfway established, in a sense, as the century reaches the halfway mark.

However, the Fed is so steeped in the growth paradigm that it is likely, even in the context of a stable population with full employment, to interpret its mandate as a call for economic growth per se. The growth would be deemed desirable not so much for the purpose of maintaining full employment—a goal already accomplished—but for the further purposes of increasing per capita consumption and GDP. To defend that interpretation, it will no doubt point to the Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1978, a sort of twin jet to the 1977 Federal Reserve Act amendments.

For the Fed to accept the logic of a steady state economy being congruent with its mandate, then or ever, it will have to develop some expertise in ecological economics. Otherwise it will remain oblivious to ecological limits and the environmental costs of growth. Even if it becomes more aware of biodiversity loss, climate change, and the unravelling of the planetary ecosystem, the Fed will fall back on the old fuzzy notion that technological progress will resolve any conflicts between economic growth and environmental protection.

The Fed will overlook the fact that research and development (the process of technological progress) entails economic growth based upon pre-existing levels of technology. It will ignore the fact that such growth will be causing the very environmental deterioration that the technological progress will be expected to mitigate from behind the 8-ball. It will overestimate the availability of environmentally beneficial R&D funding, conveniently forgetting about the numerous other forces in the private and public sectors competing for profits, dividends, and economic surplus in general.

In other words, it will take a Sustainable Monetary Policy Act to foist some ecological economics into Fed leadership and staff. A section on reorganization, at a minimum, can help with this challenge.

To inject a bit of good news, though, consider the heights to which the Fed could bring the field and practice of ecological macroeconomics, if only it chose to dig in and do so. What staunch and effective steady staters they could be!

Opening Eyes and Minds to Ecological Limits

It’s not only the Fed that has a difficult time spotting or accepting limits to growth. So did William Greider, the deep-diving author who divined the Secrets of the Temple (his dramatic handle for the Fed). At the 711^th page of his exhaustive analysis, Greider produced this telling paragraph:

“From the sixties onward, each succeeding decade produced slower growth, higher levels of permanent unemployment and declining real wages, less progress on capital formation and productivity. For many years, all these portentous developments had been blamed on inflation. Now that inflation was gone [1986], it was obvious that something else was responsible, deeper problems in the aging economic structure that remained unattended.”

Ecological economics is a poorly funded, yet richly conceptualized framework to help the Fed in determining the “monetary and credit aggregates” central to its mandate. (Issuu)

Yes, it certainly was obvious that something else was responsible, but for ecological economists, so was the “something else.” Limits to growth. Environmental, ecological, and therefore economic limits. By these later decades of the 20th century, the low-hanging thermodynamic fruits had been picked. It was getting more difficult by the year to find the land and resources—the “natural capital”—required to adequately complement the outsized stocks of labor and capital (manufactured and financial) for the sake of vigorous economic production.

Yet in the entirety of Greider’s 798-page tome, the environment never showed up. Nothing about limits to growth, the Club of Rome, Herman Daly, steady-state economics… all of which were in play during Greider’s project.

It’s not so much a critique of Greider; Secrets was more or less a biography of the Fed, not an interdisciplinary treatise. And, of the gazillion meetings attended by Fed Chair Paul Volcker and duly reported by Greider, there didn’t seem to be a single one with the Secretary of the Interior, Secretary of Agriculture, EPA Administrator or any other leader with (we would hope) a good grasp of ecological limits.

A similar phenomenon was revealed in Lords of Easy Money by the top-notch investigative journalist Christopher Leonard. To wit, from page 302:

“[Fed Governor Tom] Hoenig’s warnings in 2020 were different in one important way from his warnings a decade earlier. Now he could point to the historical record… In the 1990s labor productivity in the United states increased at an annual rate of 2.3 percent. During the decade of ZIRP [zero interest rate policy], it rose by only 1.1 percent… Average real GDP growth, a measure of the overall economy, rose an average of 3.8 percent annually during the 1990s, but by only 2.3 percent during the recent decade. The only part of the economy that seemed to benefit under ZIRP was the market for assets. The stock market more than doubled in value during the 20 tens. Even after the crash of 2020, the markets continued their stellar growth and returns.”

In other words, while the Fed was pulling out all the stops with unheard-of zero percent interest rates (and other desperate measures), the economy just wouldn’t grow as it had decades prior. Not the real economy as measured with GDP. Limits to growth were kicking further in, so instead of making a dent in the real economy, the vast majority of stimulus money flowed into Wall Street, stirring speculators into action and inflating asset prices. “Fictional capital,” some call it (echoing Marx’s concept of “fictitious capital”).

Leonard also quoted Ben Bernanke himself: “But the fact is that nobody really knows precisely what is holding back the economy” (page 140). And, like Greider, Leonard never mentioned the environment in the 373 pages of Lords.

Nor did insiders Danielle DiMartino Booth and Joseph Wang, who wrote Fed Up and Central Banking 101, respectively.

The Fed book with the most promising title—Limitless: The Federal Reserve Takes on a New Age of Crisis by Jeanna Smialek—had nothing explicit about limits to growth. However, it did include some anecdotes about an interest in climate change taken by some Fed principals, including Lael Brainerd and Jerome Powell. There’s a seed of hope in that. In general, though, Smialek described a Fed that is light years behind its cousins in the central banking community (much less the sustainability sciences) when it comes to the big-picture, long-term concern of climate change. And so far, even among the European central banking cousins, it’s more about “green growth” than limits thereto.

You can’t really blame these authors. They were mostly trying to describe what the Fed did and does. They just never witnessed Fed principals discussing limits to growth, ecological macroeconomics, or even the basic environmental underpinnings of the economy. Certainly not enough to warrant any reporting thereon.

In the Sustainable Monetary Policy Act, Congress must find and declare limits to growth, loud and clear, providing guidance to the Fed for learning and applying such crucial knowledge. The Fed needs this knowledge, not only for helping to manage a sustainable economy, but so they can stop beating their heads against the wall with the likes of ZIRP, QE, and SPVs (“special purpose vehicles,” yet another mechanism for increasing liquidity).

Utilizing a New Capacity

It’s not that the Fed has no concept of capacity. They clearly do, as evidenced by their “capacity utilization” data. The problem is that the Fed limits the concept to manufacturing, mining, and electric and gas utilities. And there is scant evidence that the Fed has a good grasp of the natural resources involved in production. Production functions, taught to all aspiring economists, are typically based on the assumption that natural resources are a given, inexhaustible, and efficiently exploited form of capital.

Federal Reserve Districts have a significant degree of bioregional coherence, increasing potential for big-picture, long-term capacity utilization assessments. (ChrisnHouston, CC BY-SA 3.0)

For estimating capacity utilization, then, the Fed focuses on the percentage of manufactured capital (plant and infrastructure) being used during the period in question. Their method entails simplistically “assuming sufficient availability of inputs to operate the capital in place.” They divide output (such as the latest year’s output of copper) by a “capacity index,” which seems to be nothing more than the output from a reference year, such as 2017.

Such an assumption belies the Fed’s notion of “sustainable maximum output.” It doesn’t take an overly long view to realize that “sustainable maximum output” is an oxymoron when applied to non-renewable resources such as oil and minerals. It should be plain as day that extracting and using non-renewable resources (such as combusting petroleum) constitutes an irreversible reduction of capacity.

And why doesn’t the Fed apply its capacity utilization concept, insufficient as it may be, to renewable natural resources such as timber, fisheries, and rangeland? At least with renewables, the concept of sustainable maximum output, or “maximum sustained yield,” is sound. Maybe the Fed ignores these resources because market share is below some unspecified threshold for the Fed’s consideration. The Fed might reason that it can’t cover all the bases of economic inputs, given its primary concerns over macroeconomic trends and policy.

Well, the Fed may want to consider that renewable natural resources comprise the foundation of the real economy. The economy has a trophic structure; a very basic principle of ecology with clear implications for monetary policy. The Fed should pay close attention to agricultural surplus, meaning production that feeds more than the farmer (as opposed to wasted excess production). It is the agricultural surplus that allows for a proportionate division of labor, which goes a long way toward determining a warranted money supply.

The Fed gets credit for recognizing the difference between actual and potential GDP. That clearly indicates some conceptual awareness of macroeconomic capacity. As usual, though, the ecological underpinnings of GDP are overlooked. From the supply side, it’s all about labor and capital. Alternatively, like at the Atlanta Fed, the difference between actual and potential GDP redounds to a Keynesian focus on demand.

Quantifiably Too Easy

A buildup to the Sustainable Monetary Policy Act can’t go without mentioning some highlights of the banking itself, as practiced or precipitated by the Fed while it endeavors to “maintain long run growth of the monetary and credit aggregates.” All that borrowing alluded to in the opening paragraph—borrowing conduced by lowering the federal funds rate—means the banking system must produce more money, far beyond the cumulative balances of their reserves.

When commercial banks issue loans, the money typically gets deposited, temporarily at least, at other banks, which are likely to loan some or all these new deposits, too. The “money multiplier” kicks in, “producing” multiples of the original amount of new (freshly loaned) money.

Before 2020, it was fashionable to calculate precisely how many dollars could be created in the century-old system of “fractional reserve banking.” For example, with a million dollars of deposits and a reserve requirement of 10%, nine million dollars of new money (minus some change) could be created.

On March 15, 2020, the Federal Reserve System abolished fractional reserve requirements and adopted a more subjective (and more opaque) “ample reserves” regime. The consensus seems to be that “ample” would be a more fitting adjective for “liquidity” than “reserves” under this new regime. To put it in lay terms, money got looser yet.

Much of the fiat money created by banks turns “fictional,” wound up in assets far removed from the real economy. (vonmeer, CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

Beyond reserve considerations, the Fed can simply computerize new money into existence. Perhaps the most infamous episode was the “quantitative easing” (QE) following the 2008 financial crisis and commencing in 2009, when the Fed “purchased” $1.25 trillion of mortgage-backed securities from imperiled commercial banks. It kept the financial system afloat, and how.

“Purchase” is a peculiar way to put it, considering the money didn’t come from a pre-existing supply, loaned in a free money market. Rather, the QE money was imagined mentally, decided upon politically, and manifested unto the balance sheets of commercial banks—the big ones like Goldman Sachs, Citibank, and Bank of America—at the touch of a keyboard.

A more socially acceptable episode of QE was when the Fed “purchased” $4.6 trillion of Treasury securities (bills, notes, and bonds) and agency mortgage-backed securities during the covid pandemic. The Fed pulled out all the stops to obviate the freezing of markets, prevent a liquidity crisis, and generally stabilize the financial system.

While these were exceptional episodes, a fear is spreading that QE has become a way of life in an increasingly indebted, unstable, and unsustainable economy. These hasty episodes of flooding the markets with money, whether producers are ready for it or not, have the “allocative effects” of enriching Wall Street investors instead. This phenomenon explains, to a large extent, the development of the “K-shaped economy,” with the rich getting richer—way richer, way faster—while the middle class heads toward poverty.

Meanwhile, as best we can tell, the Fed continues to ignore the ecological fundamentals behind the instability.

Political Viability and Statutory Context

Presumably no one is naïve enough to think that a Sustainable Monetary Policy Act, with features described or alluded to above, is politically viable at this point in history. On the other hand, to think such a policy will never be viable is hardly credible either. Governmental paradigm shifts with broad public appeal happen with some regularity. Think for example of Reinventing Government and the Contract with America, two substantive, policy-wonkish and legislatively laden movements in one decade (1990s).

Robert F. Kennedy delivered a famous critique of GDP growth at the University of Kansas. Will it be echoed at the Fed? (Bill Eppridge, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Steady staters have two giant allies in the struggle for steady-state politics: sound science and common sense. Limits to growth get more obvious by the year. Meanwhile, scientists and ecological economists are painstakingly documenting the evidence. At some point, conventional economists and lawyers will see the writing on the wall.

Unprecedented policy stands a better chance—on Capitol Hill, in the White House, and at the Fed—if the policy itself is ready and waiting in legislative form. Prior to that, talk about policy reform is just that: talk. And with limits to growth, it’s not particularly uplifting or unifying talk, as it usually tends toward lament, warning, regret, finger-pointing and the like.

So, it’s time to go beyond mere talk and consider a first-cut Sustainable Monetary Policy Act (SMPA). It’s a proactive, positive vision that should resonate not only with steady staters, but with citizens concerned with a fair shake for all, stable money, and accountability at the Fed and through the banking system at large.

To make perfect sense of the SMPA as introduced below, readers must view it as a component of the Steady State Economy Act, which is intended as a self-sufficient, omnibus bill to move the country toward a steady state economy. With plenty of effort, a little bit of luck, and maybe divine providence, the Steady State Economy Act will catch a foothold on Capitol Hill during the 2030s.

Meanwhile, “feeder bills” may be proffered on an as-viable basis. With that approach, a standalone SMPA would probably find traction toward the end of the run, complementing especially the fiscal policy measures packaged in the Steady State Economy Act, including the Sustainable Budgets Act and the Sustainable Taxes Act.

The Act

The full title of the SMPA is “An Act to establish sustainable monetary policy conducive to and corresponding with sustainable real economic activity.” Section 1 provides the short title (Sustainable Monetary Policy Act).

A Federal Reserve System attuned to uneconomic growth would be a giant leap for mankind. (CASSE)

Section 2 comprises the findings and declarations of Congress. For paradigm-shifting legislation like the SMPA, Section 2 could very well be the most important one. It’s where the new paradigm is summarized. In Subsection (a)(3), for example, Congress finds that “The best available science indicates that the national and global economies are operating at or beyond their long-term environmental capacity, and therefore unsustainably.” That will clearly be a first in monetary legislation. The corresponding declaration is in Subsection (b)(5), “The Federal Reserve System must take every precaution to avoid the growth of the economy to a level that damages long-term ecological capacity.” (These clauses give rise to Sections 7-9 pertaining to the monitoring of ecological and economic capacity.)

Herald readers familiar with the trophic theory of money will find familiarity in Section 2(a)(12), where Congress finds that “a viable money supply with real purchasing power is ultimately dependent upon the agricultural surplus at the base of the economy, which allows for a division of labor and makes money a meaningful concept.” This is the basis for several mandates to follow.

Section 3 provides definitions, some of which will likely be firsts for statutory law, including “fund-service resources.” Among the many examples of fund-service resources, forests not only provide timber (stock-flow resources) but concurrently function as funds of carbon sequestration and pollination services. These economically crucial services appear to be entirely overlooked by the pre-SMPA Fed. This is a significant problem, because overlooking the value of fund-service resources is conducive to the drawdown or liquidation of natural capital stocks.

Section 4 is where the real action begins to manifest. It calls for reorganization, putting an end to the esoteric, “quasi-governmental” stature of the Fed, placing it squarely into the U.S. government as a cabinet-level agency, with the Fed Chair reporting directly to the President. This alone would engender substantial political support.

Readers will rightfully wonder, “How’s that going to look with a President like the growth-obsessed Donald Trump?” (Kevin Warsh would wonder, too.) Recall the assumption that the SMPA presupposes the broader SSEA, which mandates the Administration to engender a public-private transition to a steady state economy. Stemming from the SSEA, steady-state fiscal and regulatory policies are concurrently at play, making it far easier for the Fed to get in the steady-state game and stick with the program.

Conversely, having the Fed chair on the Cabinet, mandated toward the steady state economy, would provide for expert macroeconomic reinforcement, helping to hold presidents and Treasury secretaries accountable.

There’s more to Section 4, like positioning the Chairman of the Commission on Economic Sustainability (a SSEA construct) on the Fed’s Board of Governors, ex officio, to provide expert advice on ecological capacity. Similarly, it adds the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City as an ex officio member of the Federal Open Market Committee (the body that sets the federal funds rate target), “for purposes of providing continual expertise on agricultural production.” Despite the general shake-up, Section 4 is designed to retain nearly all Fed board and staff, while adhering to the SSEA principle of “no net gain in bureaucracy.”

Section 5 is perhaps the most crucial section, next to the findings and declarations. Short and simple, it reorients the Fed with the new mandate of transitioning toward a steady state economy. It also calls for maintenance of a money supply “that reflects, waxes and wanes with the level of real economic activity,” fairly ensuring that at least this one effective way of keeping inflation at bay returns to Fed operations. Section 5 essentially precludes quantitative easing (short of a declaration of crisis by the Monetary Emergency Committee established in Section 14).

Section 6 calls for long-term planning; very long compared to what the Fed is accustomed to. As with the broader SSEA, Section 6 establishes a planning horizon of 150 years, essentially forcing the Fed to consider the natural world of environmental, ecological, meteorological, geological, and climatological forces. These are forces, ranging in predictability, that impact the real economy the Fed is called in Section 5 to dovetail the money supply with. Keeping these natural forces in mind will help prevent the Fed from reverting to the old mode of perpetual-growth thinking.

Section 7 establishes a Division of Ecological Capacity Monitoring to provide the Fed with expertise in natural capital accounting and the concepts and methods of ecological footprint and biocapacity assessment. This division will also provide educational resources to Fed Board and staff.

Section 8 kicks off a special role for the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City (home base of the aforementioned Tom Hoenig). Just as the New York Fed specializes in open market operations, and the Atlanta Fed specializes in payment systems, the Kansas City fed can and should—and in some ways has already started to—specialize in the agricultural surplus that literally and figuratively feeds the rest of the economy.

Section 9 helps the Fed bridge the gap from some of its old practices to the new. It builds upon the Fed’s economic “capacity utilization” assessment to a more ecologically valid approach. It expands the scope from short-term capital and labor capacity to long-term ecological and agricultural capacities.

Section 10 shifts the paradigm of the Fed from seeking zero gap between actual GDP and potential GDP. It should indeed close the gap, vis-à-vis employment, but not overall. The renewable natural resources at the trophic base of the economy need to thrive in a state of reasonable ecological integrity, and a gap between actual and potential GDP provides an insurance policy for natural disasters and geopolitical crises.

Section 11 addresses interest-rate management. While it eschews the details of open market operations, it echoes the goal of sustainability and indeed the steady state economy as populations stabilize. It reinforces the steady-state paradigm shift for the Board of Governors and the Federal Open Market Committee, and prohibits “incentivizing higher levels or faster rates of economic activity at any period during which the real economy is in ecological overshoot.”

Section 12 invokes (implicitly) the trophic theory of money and calls on the Fed to closely monitor food surpluses for more ecologically grounded insights to economic capacity and likewise to the scale of money supplies that will be neither inflationary nor deflationary.

Section 13 puts a cap on bank size and number, Section 14 limits quantitative easing to emergencies, and, as Congress runs out of gas for further monetary policy engineering, Section 15 requires the Fed to develop the detailed rules and regulations for achieving the goals and objectives of the Act (standard procedure for program-shifting legislation).

Monetary policy development has been a bridge too far for the sustainability sciences, and even in the ecological economics community. Let’s hope that the Sustainable Monetary Policy Act changes that. It could use some fleshing out over time, prior to the rollout of the omnibus Steady State Economy Act, but if we simply precipitated a paradigm shift in the Federal Reserve System—from growthmanship to steady statesmanship—the SMPA would be a profound success.

Brian Czech is CASSE’s Executive Director.

The post Special Report: Introducing the Sustainable Monetary Policy Act appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

Trump’s rollback of environmental regulations opens the floodgates for agricultural chemicals. (Precision Drone LLC, CC BY-NC 4.0)

Trump’s second-term regulatory rollbacks have already undone decades of progress in protecting public health and the environment. Not surprisingly, the safety of agricultural chemicals is among the casualties of this deregulatory fervor.

The president’s single-minded pursuit of GDP growth has meant ordering the production of more herbicides. It has meant intervening to protect their manufacturers from lawsuits, when those downwind get cancer or lose their crops. It has meant stacking his administration with former chemical industry lobbyists. And it has meant dismantling regulations that were the result of years of painstaking risk analysis.

A few recent examples are alarming in the risk they pose to human health and environmental protection.

Glyphosate: Ramping Up Production of a Probable Carcinogen

In February, the president issued an executive order directing increased production of phosphorus for two purposes. One was for its use in manufacturing war technologies. The other is its use in the herbicide glyphosate.

Glyphosate was developed in the early 1970s by Monsanto, which brought it to market under the brand name Roundup. Its widespread adoption triggered the development of “Roundup Ready” soybean, cotton, corn, and other crops, which have been genetically modified (GM) to withstand the weed killer. By 2006, more than 95 percent of all U.S. soybeans, and almost 70 percent of cotton, were glyphosate-resistant. Since glyphosate could now be sprayed over the top of plants with no damage to crops, it quickly became the most widely used herbicide in the world.

Glyphosate is the most widely used herbicide in the world, particularly across soybean, corn, and cotton crops in the U.S. Midwest and South. (USGS)

A 2026 analysis by Food & Water Watch found high rates of non-Hodgkin lymphoma in counties where glyphosate is widely used. In 2015, the World Health Organization listed glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen. The EPA does not, although it does admit glyphosate likely harms bees, birds, mammals and of course nontarget plants.

Bayer, which acquired Monsanto in 2018, has already paid out $11 billion in claims to those who say they got cancer and other diseases from glyphosate exposure. But the Trump administration is intervening on Bayer’s behalf in a case currently before the Supreme Court, a case that would protect the multinational from lawsuits over its failure to warn consumers of cancer risk.

Glyphosate’s risks are well-known, and are generating an outcry among the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) contingent of the president’s base. MAHA activists, many of them rural, enthusiastically embraced Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s pledge to reduce chemical contamination of the environment and food supply.

Yet the chemical’s near-ubiquity in much of the U.S. farm belt makes bucking the trend nearly impossible. Even farmers who wish to do so must buy the genetically modified seeds, or risk obliteration of their crops from herbicide drifting from neighboring farms.

But the biggest reason for glyphosate’s continued popularity, and for its boosters in the current administration, is economics. Several reports, most commissioned by the industry, have documented that glyphosate use has meant billions of dollars worth of agricultural productivity gains.

These gains, however, are concentrated in the first few years of use. After that, weeds evolve resistance to glyphosate and farmers must apply additional chemicals to kill off survivors.

Dicamba: New Approval Discounts Drift Damage

Their first choice is often dicamba. Though in use for decades since its first American agricultural application in 1967, dicamba use has only recently taken off. Dicamba’s volatility and tendency to drift made it less popular until recently, as glyphosate’s declining efficacy has forced farmers to use both.

Herbicide-resistant soybeans are part of a vicious cycle of ever-increasing herbicide use and genetically-modified seeds. (USDA)

Monsanto began selling dicamba-resistant seeds in 2015, and less-volatile formulations of the chemical in 2017. These developments did not prevent a record number of complaints in 2017 of crop damage from dicamba drifting onto fields sown with non-GM seed. Drifting dicamba has damaged millions of acres of crops, orchards, and native vegetation especially throughout the South. Bayer has settled claims of $400 million in damages for lost crops, while conflict between farmers has led to at least one homicide.

What is a devastating risk for farmers, though, is a marketing pitch for Bayer. It has used the threat of drift damage from neighboring farms to sell its dicamba-resistant seeds.

Courts have found that no version of dicamba is safe. Federal courts banned it in 2020, finding that political appointees at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had violated the agency’s Scientific Integrity Policy when they registered dicamba despite staff concerns. Another federal court banned it again after the first Trump Administration reapproved it in 2024, finding that the EPA had failed to allow public notice and comment on the approval as required by law.

This past February the Trump Administration once again approved dicamba, with what it claims are “the strongest protections ever.”

Activists are not convinced. The new regs reduce the amount of the chemical that may be applied annually, but allow its use year-round. Summer application, when chemicals are more volatile, brings elevated risks. Dicamba, like many chemicals used in agriculture, is also associated with elevated risk of cancer.

The most recent approval is being challenged in court.

PFAS: Forever Escaping Regulation

So is the Administration’s approval of a new pesticide containing PFAS, the toxic “forever chemicals” that persist and bioaccumulate in humans and the environment.

PFAS—perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances—are widely used in products ranging from nonstick cookware to food packaging to construction materials, electronics, and firefighting foam. In pesticides, they may be active ingredients or they may leach into product from the containers used to store it.

PFAS may also come into contact with crops through the roughly 18 percent of fertilizers containing biosolids. Biosolids are less euphemistically known as sewage sludge. They are the solid wastes left over after sludge from residential (plus often industrial) waste has gone through a wastewater treatment plant. These plants do not remove PFAS, so it remains in biosolids and the fertilizers that use them.

PFAS are ubiquitous in consumer and industrial applications, and hence in water supplies, wildlife, and humans. (New York State Department of Environmental Conservation)

PFAS’ ubiquity in consumer and industrial applications explains their presence in human tissues, where they cause diseases including immune suppression, cancer, liver damage and reproductive and developmental harms.

It also explains their presence in 83 percent of tested rivers, lakes, and streams, and in wildlife in remote areas.

States have begun to regulate PFAS, with 37 states placing limitations on its permitted levels in drinking water. Federal regulations were a long time coming, but the Biden administration for the first time set limits on PFAS in drinking water and proposed standards that would limit their discharge by chemical manufacturers.

True to form, the Trump administration has announced rollbacks to these regulations. The administration has withdrawn PFAS discharge limits, leaving no limit to the amount that chemical manufacturers can discharge into waterways. And while limits on the two most common PFAS chemicals will remain, industry has until 2031 to comply. The administration says it will rescind and reconsider limits on four other PFAS chemicals established by Biden.

EPA has long failed to regulate PFAS in biosolids, which may contaminate 70 million acres of farmlands and pose significant risks to humans, livestock, and wildlife. Several states have banned or limited application of biosolids, but EPA’s efforts have been limited to risk assessments.

Biden’s risk assessment would have drastically limited the use of biosolid fertilizers, but Republicans in Congress last summer killed the process after meeting with a sludge industry trade group. A new Trump risk assessment of biosolid fertilizers, advocates say, sugarcoats the risks.

Captured Agencies Do Industry’s Bidding

Entire regulatory systems are at risk in agencies staffed and influenced by the industries they are supposed to regulate (Farm & Country Insurance, CC BY-NC 4.0)

While somehow coming as a shock to MAHA, Trump’s actions to facilitate chemical industry growth will not surprise most. The top four positions in Trump’s EPA toxics office are held by former industry lobbyists.

Among them is Kyle Kunkler, who now oversees the EPA’s pesticide program and was formerly with the American Soybean Association. Such groups are a major force for chemical agriculture, says Bill Freese, Science Director for the Center for Food Safety. Groups that ostensibly represent farmers have a far more benign public image than the pesticide industry itself. Their relative credibility, Freese noted in an interview with the Herald, is one reason why fighting chemical agriculture has been such an uphill battle.

At the behest of such powerful lobbies, the administration is poised to dismantle the entire chemical risk evaluation system. The Biden EPA’s approach to chemical risk evaluation under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) required a determination of risk for a chemical as a whole, taking into account many possible pathways of exposure. The new system would require evaluation of each of a chemical’s individual uses, ignoring cumulative effects. And it would pre-empt state bans, like those of PFAS.

Trump’s deregulatory whirlwind has also touched down on Biden’s chemical accident prevention rule, with a proposal to weaken it significantly.

Road to Growth Paved with Chemical Deregulation

This dizzying array of chemical deregulatory actions may well lead to GDP growth. AI data centers will be major beneficiaries, as many of their components contain PFAS. In its enthusiasm for this industry, the administration has announced that it will prioritize TSCA review of new chemicals needed for data center construction.

Chemical, wastewater, and agricultural industries will also surely benefit from the lax regulatory climate.

Apologists for chemical-laden agricultural systems will argue that these systems are essential to feed a planet of 8.3 billion and counting. But this narrative “is just gaslighting us to support greater use of chemicals and industrial agriculture,” says Freese. “We overproduce food.”

The purpose of chemical agriculture, Freese says, is not so much agricultural productivity, but reducing labor costs. “It’s about getting people out of the picture and replacing labor with capital.”

Agricultural systems that are compatible with human health and a finite planet will take more than just new combinations of chemicals and genetically-modified plants.

Growing food to feed humans directly, rather than to feed livestock, uses a fraction of the pesticides, herbicides, fertilizer, and land area. (Scienmag, CCO 1.0)

As Freese noted, the vast majority of pesticides, herbicides, and petrochemical fertilizer are used on the corn, soybean, and other commodity crop monocultures that blanket most agricultural land in the US and across the world. For the most part, these are crops that feed livestock, not humans. Far fewer chemicals, and half the land area, would be required if we grew crops primarily for direct human consumption instead of for livestock

A transition to plant-based agriculture would be a giant step toward an agricultural system in line with planetary limits. But it would not be the entire journey. Agricultural systems that cover 40 percent of the planet’s ice-free land area account for an enormous share of the human ecological footprint. The administration’s unrestrained growth agenda cannot lean even more heavily upon these systems without deepening irreversible ecological damage.

An agriculture of the future must certainly be less chemically dependent, and it must embrace more organic, regenerative, and plant-based elements. It must also go through a phase of degrowth to a steady state, along with a human population and economy that fit on a finite planet.

Kirsten Stade is a staff writer at CASSE.

The post Chemical Safety Sacrificed on the Road to GDP appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.