There are side effects to growth. We lose cultural practices, we lose languages, we lose neighborhoods, we lose species, we lose entire ecologies.

I actually really appreciate the conservative (well...Republican) argument that sometimes it’s worth it. Maybe we should burn some fossil fuels to help developing countries build economically, bring down mortality, be able to support larger investments, etc, in exchange for some extinctions, and the loss of some indigenous culture. I’m open to that.

But you also have to be open to the fact that sometimes it’s not worth it, and ask what does it look like if we were to try to preserve our cultural and biological heritage. This is a conservative ideal too.

And when I think about how to do that, I am drawn back to Japan over and over who solved many of these problems hundreds or thousands of years ago. Japan has already asked the question: “should we destroy all of our native ecologies and cultures in order to fuel industrial growth?” And they are one of the few countries who has taken a stance on that issue, and succeeded at preserving things America seems destined to continually destroy in its relentless path towards an industrial monoculture.

We can’t write that off as provincialism or regressiveness. We (in the U.S.) have something to learn here, and the advantage is not entirely ours.