Development and Growth

Tim Morton, in Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World, describes hyperobjects from lots of different angles, including by saying: consider the blank spots in your view of the world, and give attention to them. You'll see that they aren't blank after all.

That is the tie between hyperobjects and the plenum: they are complementary. BUT, plenum should be understood not as material monism, but of the region of interpenetrating union of quantity and quality.

For instance, Herman E. Daly wrote in Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development, that his attempt to literally draw the environment around economy - any and all economy - in a diagram in a watershed World Bank report, to show that not only does the earth have a finite carrying capacity which supports all growth, but that the economic growth pictured and promoted in the World Bank's report exceeds that carrying capacity, was thwarted.

The economists writing the report had no interest in looking beyond the gears and goo of material economy to see what was feeding the gears and coming out goo. They took the material vacuum - and the absolute separation of objects as they appear in Cartesian space - to be real, and their refusal to acknowledge even the material environment as the only reasonable view to hold.

Two things happened, at least: The report was published, without the diagram (with or without his suggested change); Daly and other economists wrote and published their own corrective viewpoint. The gist of that viewpoint is this: growth and development must be distinguished, because it's development that is limitless, not growth, which happens in the realm and at the expense of the Earth.

An ideal economy maintains size and optimizes development.

This works, of course, because there are qualitative as well as material U-bends that confound us into forgetting all about what lies beyond it, but we can and must learn to see beyond. From there, a sustainable economy will be a cinch.