This commentary is by Miriam Voran, who practices psychoanalytic psychotherapy in Montpelier and West Lebanon. She is a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth.
It’s indisputable: We have a crisis.
A housing crisis, we call it. More people want to live in Vermont than we can support. The state’s Agency of Commerce and Community Development predicts we will need at least 24,000 new homes over the next five years. With an aging population, Vermont faces a workforce shortage. Without more housing, we’re warned, Vermont’s economy will die.
Vermont’s lack of affordable housing is also immoral. The present shortage drives home prices and rents sky-high. We are seeing more unhoused individuals, more whose housing costs outpace their income, and many middle and low-income families who simply cannot afford to buy homes.
We dare not become the playground of the wealthy, the privileged who protect their bit of paradise.
To solve the crisis, Vermont has loosened environmental regulations in developed districts and funded infrastructure to encourage growth. More housing, we believe, is an economic and moral imperative. Yet, we are tortured to see the clear-cutting of land and the loss of cooling vegetation and wildlife habitat — all to build more hardscaping that sheds water and reflects heat and to house ever more humans.
Important as it is, the housing imperative is the least of our problems. Growth comes with costs that Earth can no longer bear. In 2020, humanity crossed an unthinkable line: the mass of human-made stuff exceeded all living biomass on Earth.
We’ve blown past our right-sized place on the planet. We’re just one of over 8 million species, but we’re crowding out the rest of nature. We’re losing birds, wild mammals, reptiles and insects at an unprecedented rate. We’re destroying the climate, and we’re destroying the lacework of life.
We’re in overshoot. Overshoot occurs when a species’ population outgrows its environment. Earth Overshoot Day is the day by which we’ve exhausted all the resources that Earth can generate for the year. This year, it arrived on July 24, eight days earlier than last year. For the next five months, we are stealing resources from future generations. We’re spewing pollution Earth cannot absorb. Humanity now uses 1.8 Earths each year.
Ecologists say that even experts cannot understand our nightmare. Even they underestimate the challenges of avoiding a ghastly future.
Overshoot will likely cause the collapse of global supply chains, violent conflicts over shrinking resources, mass migrations from climate change and the hoarding of remaining wealth by a few.
No governmental body can address the crisis. A population decline during the second half of this century is inevitable. The only question is, do we decline deliberately or do we crash?
From pandemics and floods to President Donald Trump’s dismantling of almost everything, we daily experience unimaginable destruction. Some claim that the worldwide rise in authoritarian populist leaders is itself a symptom of overshoot.
There’s a certain tribalism here in Vermont. It is, perhaps, just as dangerous as isolationism. Our tribalism is pro-growth. We’re pro-housing, pro-worker immigration, pro-economic expansion. This, we’re told, leads to abundance and a sustainable future. We’re clinging to outdated views of security. We’re protecting our tribal interests while destroying Earth as a sustainable home for biodiverse life.
In times of crisis, morality changes. The old morality of individual rights no longer works. Because we’re trapped in a bad-ending game, morality must adjust to the vital needs of the larger human community. This means not just the community in front of us, but the community of the future, a community that exists within ecological limits. Survival ethics requires changing our morality and changing our game.
It’s almost impossible to imagine such change. But if humanity is to survive, the ecologists say we will need to down-size the global population between 2 billion and 3 billion.
Anticipating the collapse of global supply chains, we would want to right-size local populations to fit regional resources. Sure, this threatens endless economic growth. But there is an alternative: the steady-state economy that fits within ecological limits.
Without this ethical shift, we’re marching off the cliff, like the mythical lemmings. It’s the legacy of our infancy. We never forget those early days of helplessness, screaming in our cribs, utterly dependent on the kindness of caregivers. We learn from the beginning to fit in and please. It’s the way we keep resources coming.
Over the years, the urge to please and belong extends to friends, employers, community, even the broader culture. We embrace business as usual, even bad business, to belong. We don’t ask uncomfortable questions or start awkward conversations for fear of being ostracized.
Let us hope we can find our collective capacity to tolerate our fear of ostracism. Maybe, when our hearts are shattered, we’ll find our courage to look reality in the eye and speak truth to each other.
