Andrew is quite right, of course. But if you can't trust your neighborhood ecologist, whom CAN you trust? Boom and bust cycles can be moderated by interventions, and that's the history--moving from hunting and gathering to cacheing, to hoarding, to stealing, to monocultures, to scales of exploitation beyond survival and even comfort.
Instead of trying to go back, perhaps we can advance through a post-industrial stage where excesses can be eased and sufficiency, even a redefined "luxury" level be inserted into the system to soften the crash long enough for more of us to catch on to how much more rewarding and adequate life is than an excessive one? Just working on WASTE, for example, is one way of coming a little closer to staying within the energy cycle and degrading the support system less? But the true test is the TREND, whether or not that DIRECTION is sustained over the long term. Spreading awareness is necessary, but making that spreading more palatable, more gracious, and less self-righteous (starting right here) might be preferable to spreading awarness at the tip of a sharp tongue, like not spreading "democracy" at the point of a gun? All that's happening, and it may necessarily be a ragged process, but just such contributions as Andrew's, while they may not elicit a proportional feedback as sufficient reward, do their part to maintain the trend, no matter how flat the curve may look. But the cup is still 1/16th full--and rising and falling and rising and . . . WT ----- Original Message ----- From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Wayne Tyson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, December 01, 2008 7:48 PM Subject: Re: Economic Growth and limits Of course there is always a good IMMEDIATE reason to keep the engines of economic growth going. The contributors to this thread raise valid points. Increased efficiency in our use of raw materials, energy, and the land needed to expoloit them might offset the tendency of a growing economy to exploit all of this stuff. But for how long........ The problem is that economic growth is exponential. Two percent growth today represents substantially more production (be it actual or virtual wealth) than two percent growth in 1960, or even 1990. So to keep pace with growth in GDP (or whatever standard mesasure of production you want to use), the efficiency with which we use stuff would have to improve exponentially too for there to be a zero net effect of growth. Maybe some processes (the material hardware needed for computer memory, perhaps) have kept pace with exponential growth. Other processes, e.g. fuel efficiency, agricultural production, materials intensity of car manufacture have improved, but not exponentially I think. Of course, we COULD have increased fuel efficiency a good deal faster (why didn't we? - one of life's little mysteries, but GM is about to find out that it should have). Ultimately however, a ceiling of all efficiencies must be reached. What will we do then? Rationalization of the "need" for economic growth is a symptom of denial. Eventually, we are going to be faced with limits imposed by thermodynamics, and the fact that, no matter how efficient you are, houses, cars, and even computers will have to contain certian minimal ammounts of material to remain viable. If we were to exercise forethought, we would be researching ways to wean ourselves off of exponential growth before some of those hard limits arrive at our collective doorstep. Best, Andy Park -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG - http://www.avg.com Version: 8.0.176 / Virus Database: 270.9.12/1823 - Release Date: 12/1/2008 7:59 PM
