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Can We Survive Endless Exponential Growth?
“While exponential growth is a remarkable manifestation of our extraordinary accomplishments as a species,” says Geoffrey West in Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies, “built into it are the potential seeds of our demise and the portent of big troubles just around the next corner.”
Although there are some that still deny that all of the activity of drilling, burning, melting, and building we’ve done as a species has had any effect on the environment, most thinking people are coming around to realizing that the majority of scientists who claim that climate change is something to be concerned about are probably more trustworthy than the oil magnates who say it isn’t. And since many people have concluded that the pollution we put into the environment does, in fact, have repercussions, we are realizing that the endless economic growth sold to us by those who are reaping the greatest benefits of it may not be the economic goal we should be striving for.
“Mainstream economics views endless economic growth as a must,” says Kate Raworth in Doughnut Economics, “but nothing in nature grows forever, and the attempt to buck that trend is raising tough questions in high-income but low-growth countries. It may not be hard to give up having GDP growth as an economic…
