• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 835 0

principle—and have palpably failed, as the economist Tim Jackson candidly admits in his thoughtful 2009 treatise on the subject, Prosperity Without Growth. The alternative to growth in the modern market system is painful contraction, unemployment, and political instability, as numerous recessions since the 1930s have demonstrated. Given the need for interest to be paid on capital and for increases in labor productivity to be balanced out by higher levels of overall production, growth is central to successful capitalist economies. No one argues, however, that the kind of rapid double-digit rates of growth seen today in successful emerging economies are appropriate for the likes of Europe, Japan, or North America. In developed countries, 2–3 percent per year is plenty. This differential is helping to reduce global inequality too, in stark contrast to the fears expressed a few years ago by the anti-globalization movement. But even in rich countries, zero growth is not a viable option.

Another piece of good news is that as economies grow they tend to become less resource-intensive per unit of output. In other words, we are constantly getting relatively more efficient in our use of the world’s resources even as the overall level of human consumption grows. This trend toward dematerialization is positive for several planetary boundaries. In the area of nitrogen, for example, Chinese food production rose by nearly 200 percent between 1981 and 2007, for only a 50 percent increase in fertilizer.10 Another study, looking at the same multi-decadal period, found that a 45 percent more affluent world used only 22 percent more crops and 13 percent more energy.11 Of course, in both these cases, absolute resource use went up even as relative use went down—because of economic growth. But this is not always the case. Some basic resources are even being used at lower absolute levels as humanity gets more affluent: Between 1980 and 2006, for instance, a richer world actually used 20 percent less wood.

Looking further out into the future, it is perhaps possible to envisage a world economy that enjoys constant growth even as its use of materials is static or even declining, thanks to dematerialization. Technology will help: In consuming music electronically via downloads rather than plastic CDs, we use less oil. E-books and online information dissemination will hopefully eventually reduce paper consumption too. At a conceptual level, what we must surely aim for is a closed-loop economy, where rates of recycling come as close to 100 percent as practically possible, and what is not recycled can be regenerated naturally within the biosphere. (This recycling may vary from low-tech, via people sorting their garbage, to high-tech, using plasma-arc reactors.) Within such a system, consumption rates can still rise as materials circulate faster. The only external ingredient that must also increase in order to drive this is energy: And energy is not limited at all in any fundamental thermodynamic sense, if nuclear fission (on Earth) and fusion (in the sun) are utilized sustainably. The planetary boundaries provide a physical and ecological limit to how far humans can trespass on the biosphere, but if we respect them fully then I believe that growth—as currently conceived—can continue more or less indefinitely. In contrast to many environmentalists, I do not see any convincing ecological reason why everyone in the world should not be able to enjoy rich-country levels of prosperity over the half-century to come. None of the planetary boundaries rule out this leap forward in human development—and as far as the Earth system is concerned, it is the boundaries that must provide the ultimate guidelines to the human project.

Humanity has so far transgressed only three of the nine planetary boundaries—biodiversity, climate, and nitrogen—and has successfully navigated away from a breach of one, the ozone layer. Boundaries on ocean acidification, land use, and water use are still avoidable. I am confident that we can respect them, and move back into the safety