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Published Letters: 322
Editor's Choice: 28
The 800-pound gorilla in the corner of the room where economic growth is being debated is human population growth. According to the Census Bureau, we have gifted Gaia with a net increase of a little over 261,000 humans every day during 2006. Nearly a couple of million extra humans every week. Talk about your unsustainable growth!
We need to remember that the concept of economic growth, as we have come to know and expect it, is no older than the scientific and technological revolution which made it possible. It is no coincidence that Adam Smith and Isaac Newton came along just before humanity hit its first billion, after maybe 18,000 years of trying in our current H. sapiens incarnation, around 1800 CE.
The couple of centuries since then is less than an eye-blink in ecological time. Our human response, breeding ourselves to the limits of the carrying capacity of the earth, if not beyond (if I knew how, I would link to Salon's review of Pearce, When the Rivers Run Dry), suggests that science and technology and economic growth, and the comfortable life they have made possible, will turn out to be an evolutionary dead end.
