Guest Opinion | A wish for my community in 2025

Growth and Overshoot

Growth, the basis of our local and the global economy, will not continue much longer. There are many intersecting reasons for this, but all can be described with one word: overshoot.

What is overshoot? It is a word that describes how we humans are using far more resources than can be regenerated by Earth, and producing far more waste than the Earth can assimilate. Overshoot is like having a checking account and a savings account and using not only all the money in our checking account each year, but also drawing down our savings account. Everyone knows if we spend down our savings account, eventually we’ll run out of money. In ecological terms, eventually we’ll run out of easily-extractable resources and do so much damage from the pollution we’ve created, life-as-we-know-it will cease to exist. 

Humanity is well into overshoot, and so this situation cannot last much longer.

Part of overshoot is over-population—there are simply far too many of us to be supported by the Earth’s regenerative capacity. Typically, when a species overshoots the carrying capacity of its environment, the species’ population declines rapidly; that is, the population of that species collapses. While in overshoot, a species degrades its carrying capacity below the original capacity, so after collapse, the species’ population is often below what it was pre-collapse, which gives the environment time to recover. As the environment recovers, the species population begins to grow again and the cycle continues. For most species, predators and disease help to keep populations in check and increases the time between overshoot cycles, or prevents overshoot entirely. 

We humans went into overshoot as a species quite a while ago, due to help from fossil fuels, a lack of predators (we exterminated them), and medical advancements that keep more of us alive long enough to reproduce at higher rates than we’d otherwise be able to. We have managed to continue in this state of overshoot for quite a while by extracting non-renewable materials, including massive amounts of fossil fuels, from the Earth; however, this will not last. It cannot last—“non-renewable” means the materials we rely on, once gone or depleted to the point we can no longer extract them profitably, will run out eventually, so depending on these materials ensures future collapse. 

So how long do we have before our own population collapses?

The answer to that question is unknown, but it seems likely the answer is “not long.” Whether that’s a decade or many remains to be seen, but relative to the time humans have been on Earth (in our current form, about 300,000 years), it is most assuredly not long.

Whether you look at climate change—and the predicted +2.5C (or more, as global warming is accelerating) by 2050—or global pollution, or habitat loss, or biodiversity loss, or degraded topsoil, or any other metric of overshoot, we are in trouble, with the potential for catastrophic impacts fairly soon. Some impacts are already quite visible—just look at the number of devastating floods in 2024, or the 60% decline in sperm count in human males, in just a few decades, from toxic pollution—as just two of many examples of just how deeply in trouble we are already.

Population

Even if you don’t believe overshoot exists (it does) or that it will impact us (it will), you might be concerned about population growth rate declines. No one really knows why for sure, but population growth rates are tanking in developed nations and falling slowly in most of the nations where this growth rate is still high. From Watching Population Bomb, by Tom Murphy:

“Some of the biggest countries are surprisingly far down the curve. India, the world’s most populous nation these days, is at 2.0, below replacement rate; China, second most populous, is at a stunningly low 1.1 despite recent efforts by its government to encourage births. The United States, third most populous, is at 1.7, and Indonesia, fourth, is at 2.1. Only with the fifth, Pakistan, do you get a rate that will sustain population growth, 3.3, and only with the sixth, Nigeria, do you get the kind of fertility rate the whole world had half a century ago, 5.1. Only six countries on the planet have a higher fertility rate than Nigeria does, while 187 have a lower rate. At the very bottom is South Korea, with a 0.8 fertility rate; if that stays unchanged, it will leave each generation not much more than a third the size of the generation before it.”

Because the global economy requires growth in order to stay afloat (typically a gross world product growth rate of about 2.3% or more), declines in population growth rates are freaking out some people who are heavily invested in continuous economic growth—the “infinite Earthers” I call them; a bit like “flat Earthers” only for growth instead of shape.  People like Elon “Shadow President” Musk, for instance. They know that to maintain this way of life just a little bit longer, we need a growing economy, and an economy only grows if there are more people buying more stuff (or fewer buying a whole ton more stuff, which is difficult in an era of dwindling resources, high inflation rates, and growing awareness of the impacts of high consumption). 

With declining population growth rates, particularly those below replacement rates, countries either must import more people via immigration, which often has its own ugly consequences (conflicts, both political and physical, as we see happening around the world in countries with high immigration rates), or degrow their economies. Most countries are not set up to handle degrowth well, as degrowth without significant planning can lead to declines in services, crumbling infrastructure, declines in life expectancy, increased poverty, and conflict over a shrinking pot of resources, both financial and material.

Whether future global population declines because these growth rate declines continue or because of the impacts of overshoot or a bit of both, population will decline, and this will force us here in San Juan County to completely rethink how we run the county. 

Local trouble

The one symptom of overshoot that San Juan County seems most concerned about is climate change, but this is just one of many impacts of overshoot. Due to the wealth in this county, and the wealth in this country, we have been relatively insulated from most of these impacts so far (although some like toxic pollution are impacting us here just like everyone—human and non-human—in the world), but they will come for us sooner or later. 

The point is, we are in trouble, even here in seemingly idyllic and relatively wealthy San Juan County. And yet, as far as I can tell, no one is planning for how we might deal with this trouble, and most of all, how we might deal with the end of growth that is the inevitable outcome of this trouble.

Will the county wake up to this situation, or will it continue with the “everything is fine, as long as we drive EVs and heat our homes with heat pumps” attitude that seems to pervade the county’s governance strategies?

Overshoot is not really something we can do much about. Yes, we can try to protect as much of the natural world as we can to help buffer us from the coming catastrophes associated with overshoot, but we cannot stop overshoot. 

So what can we do? We can understand the trouble that’s coming as well as possible and begin building a plan for resilience. Doing so will help allay our fears about what’s coming, and create stronger community bonds. 

My wish

So, to my wish. My wish for the new year is that 2025 be the year that San Juan County gets real about the situation we are in and begins a serious plan for degrowth, community resiliency, and ecological restoration.

This is a project that will take years to plan and decades to implement. We had better start soon, because the house of cards I described above is tilting, precariously. There is nothing we can do to stop it from crashing at this point; what we can do is everything in our power to limit the inevitable suffering—for humans and non-humans alike.

The Comprehensive Plan

At least part of how a municipality or county might plan for community resiliency will happen through the comprehensive plan process. The comprehensive plan is the guiding document for San Juan County, and it is a way we local citizens can engage in the planning process.

Most comprehensive plans take growth as a given, as this county’s does, in part because in Washington State counties are required to comply with the Washington State Growth Management Act (GMA). The other part is that growth is the foundational ideology of the global economy and it filters down into every nook and cranny of every planning department everywhere.

As our plan states, “Past trends show that population growth will occur,” “Planning for growth has never before been so imperative,” and “When San Juan County plans to accommodate growth, it not only plans for an increase in residents, but also anticipates more visitors.”

Growth is thus built into our plan.

However, a full cost accounting of growth does not occur, because most of the costs of growth are externalized onto the environment and onto citizens. The costs of growth include:

• Ecological: the conversion of undeveloped land to human development, habitat fragmentation, increased waste and pollution;
• Financial: increased taxes for roads, schools, utilities, public safety, government services, social services, and loss of “natural services” (a phrase I despise as it objectifies nature, it describes the “services” nature currently does for us, for free);
• Quality of life: increased congestion, pollution, and crime, and reduced access to nature.

The ideology of infinite growth has thoroughly captured all levels of government—federal, state, county, and municipal—but it is here at the county/municipal level that we can most effect change, by speaking up, attending meetings, forming local groups, joining boards and commissions, and running for office.

This county, like all others, has been captured by the ideology of growth and its inevitability and benefit for the future of the county. There is little point in engaging in a process for a comprehensive plan that is fundamentally at odds with reality. So what would a plan that accurately reflects reality look like, one that might actually inspire participation?

A Degrowth Plan

Challenging the growth narrative is perhaps the primary place to begin. We must challenge the growth narrative broadly throughout our government and our comprehensive plan, developing instead a degrowth plan that can take place over a number of years to increase the resiliency of our local human and natural communities.

I personally do not know how we can do this legally in this county, given the requirements of the GMA, but we must do it anyway. I will note here that the GMA has some positive benefits as it controls the impact of growth to a degree; however, as a law that assumes growth, it is fundamentally at odds with our need for degrowth in order to create more resilient communities. It should, in fact, be re-legislated as the Degrowth Management Act. The GMA is human-made legislation and we can unmake it if we choose to. Perhaps we can begin that process here in SJC.

With all this in mind, here are some suggestions for how we might modify the vision and plan for our local community to implement a degrowth plan.

First and foremost we must conduct a comprehensive ecological footprint analysis of the county as a benchmark to frame policy decisions to reduce the community’s ecological footprint. Everything else we do must be based in this footprint analysis.

Once we better understand our ecological footprint and have this as a basis for our decision-making, some ideas for how we might move forward include:

• Reduce and eventually eliminate tourism, since it drives much of the growth in the county;
• Plan for the inevitable reduced population—both visitor and resident;
• Limit development by restricting allowable impacts on sensitive areas, protecting habitat, and expanding conservation areas by purchasing more land using conservation easements;
• Set increasing impact fees for any development still allowed;
• Pass county law to set maximum house sizes, with plans to reduce those limits over time;
• Pass county law to set maximum electricity use, with cost that scales so the most profligate users pay the most, and with plans to reduce those limits over time;
• Put into place serious energy reduction plans for all types of energy, and support businesses and people making those reductions;
• Dismantle the infrastructure of the built environment where it is no longer necessary (i.e., as population and visitors decline);
• Limit water use to the strictly necessary (e.g. no swimming pools, no water use by unsustainable industries, etc.);
• Restore ecosystems and habitat to support native trees, plants, and animals;
• Reduce transportation requirements by concentrating remaining residents in areas near to services;
• Support low-energy use transportation like walking, biking, and horse-drawn mobility;
• Substitute imported goods with locally sourced products (food, fiber, etc.) where possible without impacting local conservation areas (this will require a much reduced population);
• Reduce complexity by reducing reliance on high-tech systems;
• Support and encourage reuse, repair, and refurbishing of materials and products;
• Support the local food economy with direct funding for storage and processing facilities and for daily local food and farmer’s markets;
• Recognize and plan for the need for greatly increased resilience as the impacts of overshoot grow at the state and federal level, including economic downturns; reductions in services such as transportation, medical care, etc.; increased energy costs; and so on;
• Form community networks to help build resilience, and to substitute for services we currently rely on state and federal governments to supply;
• Move from the focus on individual property rights to environmental preservation and restoration;
• And perhaps most important, develop a land and nature preservation ethic in the county council and the various commissions that can become an inherent and driving ethic of our government and the way we live here in this place.

I understand it is highly unlikely that anyone from the county government or planning commission will read this, and that if they did, they’d likely think “This is impossible” or “She’s crazy.” Most of you reading this will think the same. The property rights folks and infinite Earthers will have a cow. (Please remember, these are just suggestions and I’m in no position with any power to make any of it happen… it’s just talk!)

But I am compelled to put it out there anyway, because as Bill Rees suggested in my series on ecological overshoot in the fall of 2023, talking about ecological overshoot is the most important thing we can do. This is me talking about it, and not just talking about it abstractly, but attempting to make concrete suggestions.

As I said above, I do not see the point in engaging in the comprehensive plan process unless those invested in that process are willing to face reality. I don’t expect that will happen, but it will surely never happen unless we are willing to talk about it.

In the meantime, overshoot and its many symptoms—pollution, habitat destruction, wildlife loss, climate change, etc.—continue to worsen, and the closer we get to the tipping point here in Washington State, and thus, here in San Juan County. For the natural world, that point arrived a long time ago. For some humans, perhaps many, in other parts of the world, it’s already arrived there too. And it will be here soon, ready or not. 

Will we be ready?