many social challenges that we hoped economic
growth would solve – poverty, stress and ill health
for example seem reluctant to respond to the cure.
I am only too aware of the argument from developing countries that they should not be denied the benefits that the developed world has enjoyed, albeit to such an overblown degree, but we must all recognize what will happen if we do not think again and think constructively about how to build a better economic system for the future, one that understands the limitations and dangers inherent in our present industrial mindset. We have to find ways of ending poverty, but we also need to look at the way societies have developed in the richer parts of the world. We need to question the unbridled encouragement of consumerism and, I am afraid to say, we also have to address that issue that so often is side-stepped as being just too hot to handle, the question of population increase. Not only because of what will happen to the very lifesupport systems of our planet if we do not do so, but also the consequences this will have on the welfare of people. As the biologist Paul Ehrlich has pointed out, ‘there is no technological fix that will allow perpetual population and economic growth.’ At some point we will need to recognize that there are very important limits to what Nature can withstand, and that these limits must determine what we can demand of the stressed systems we rely upon. I am absolutely sure that this question of population growth has to be part of the debate about developing a different philosophy for living.
LEFT: Aerial view of crowded favela housing contrasts with modern apartment buildings in São Paulo, Brazil. Scenes like this remind us that rapid economic growth does not automatically solve pressing social challenges. Despite decades of growth many countries remain socially divided at the same time as environmental damage has accelerated.
After all, the simple fact that I have tried to demonstrate so far is that pursuing ever more conventional economic development, based on growing the economy by promoting more consumption of goods and services, and doing so for billions more people in the next forty years, will place an impossible strain on the finite resources and inherent capacity of the Earth to renew and replenish herself. The simple arithmetic says that we cannot expect to succeed.
If, as some economists have done, we consider the services we derive from Nature as if they amounted to an annual income, then, as an example, in 2008 we had used up our entire yearly budget by mid-September. That was a few days earlier than the one in 2007. In both cases, from then until New Year’s Day we were living by liquidating our capital assets: the forests, soil, fresh water, fisheries and biodiversity. So we are already operating on a diminished return, and that is with 6.8 billion people. If the world’s population continues to balloon as every prediction says it will, and if economic development continues at the pace we are forcing it to, then this ‘credit overdraft’ is set to get a lot bigger and its effects a lot worse. By mid-century the idea of making it to September will be a pipedream. We will have used up the Earth’s depleted services by April and by then the degradation of our capital assets will have put Nature close to going bust.
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