An Agro-Based Society after Post-Industrial Society: From a Perspective of Economic Growth Paradigm

Hongyun Han,Sheng Xia

doi:10.3390/socsci10120455

Abstract

Since the Industrial Revolution, a new era has arisen called the Anthropocene, in which human actions have become the main driver of global environmental change outside the stable environmental state of the Holocene. During the Holocene, environmental change occurred naturally, and the Earth’s regulatory capacity maintained the conditions that enabled human development. Resource overexploitation of the industrial “Anthropocene”, under the principle of profit maximization, has led to planetary ecological crises, such as overloaded carbon sinks and climate changes, vanishing species, degraded ecosystems, and insufficient natural resources. Agro-based society, in which almost all demands of humans can be supported by agriculture, is characterized by life production. The substitution of Agro-based society for a post-industrial society is an evolutionary result of social movement, it is an internal requirement of a sustainable society for breaking through the resource constraint of economic growth. The core feature of agriculture is to use organisms as production objects and rely on life processes to achieve production goals. The substitution of Agro-based society for a post-industrial society is the precondition for a sustainable carbon cycle, breaking through the resource limits of the industrial “Anthropocene”, alleviating the environmental pressure of economic development, and promoting society from increasing disorderly entropy to orderly decreasing entropy. Meanwhile, technological advancements and growing environmental awareness of society make it feasible for the substitution of an agro-based society for a post-industrial society.

Highlights

In 2008, the New Economics Foundation proposed “a paradigm shift from the general and unlimited pursuit of economic growth to a concept of “right-sizing”, as a clear-sighted and inspiring vision of the 2008’s Green New Deal (Barbier 2009), which suggested that the creation of economic prosperity was not senselessly decoupled from environmental issues (Mauerhofer 2019; Spash 2012)
Despite the previous work noted above, behind this obvious but difficult question lies an even thornier one: what exactly is the alternative to economic growth? The objective of this paper aims to answer the question if and how a process of economic growth can materialize from within a new agro-based society with the help of bio-based technologies
The resource limits of the affluent industrial “Anthropocene” are discussed in Section 1, which provides the theoretical backbone for the claims made in this article; Section 2 outlines the logical basis for the substitution of an agro-based society for an industrial society; Sections 3 and 4 outline the necessity and feasibility of the substitution of an agro-based society for an industrial society, respectively

Summary

Introduction

In 2008, the New Economics Foundation proposed “a paradigm shift from the general and unlimited pursuit of economic growth to a concept of “right-sizing”, as a clear-sighted and inspiring vision of the 2008’s Green New Deal (Barbier 2009), which suggested that the creation of economic prosperity was not senselessly decoupled from environmental issues (Mauerhofer 2019; Spash 2012). The objective of this paper aims to answer the question if and how a process of economic growth can materialize from within a new agro-based society with the help of bio-based technologies. These sociological insights and ideas have been remarkably absent from the scientific discussion about the agro-based society after the post-industrial society through the abandonment of capitalism and the establishment of a sustainable economy. We believe that it is unlikely that material use will be reduced if the economy grows within the classical paradigm of capitalism, a shift in the growth paradigm is required to ensure the feasibility of a social transformation

Objectives

Findings

Conclusion