Clinging to economic growth suffocates the imagination

After 40 years, the message of The Limits to Growth report is still not being heard. We need other ways to share a finite planet Andrew Simms, guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 1 February 2012 08.00 GMT Listen to the news today and you would think that economic growth was the only answer to all our problems. But 40 years ago "The Limits to Growth", written by a group of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and published by The Club of Rome, broke a modern taboo: it suggested that growth itself might be the problem. It wasn't the first time someone had suggested that an economy endlessly expanding in scale was neither possible nor necessarily desirable. As long ago as 1821, David Ricardo wrote of the ultimate equilibrium to which economic development led. And, in his Principles of Political Economy, 1848, John Stuart Mill raised and answered the question like this: "Towards what ultimate point is society tending by its industrial progress? When the progress ceases, in what condition are we to expect that it will leave mankind? It must always have been seen, more or less distinctly, by political economists, that the increase of wealth is not boundless: that at the end of what they term the progressive state lies the stationary state, that all progress in wealth is but a postponement of this." Why, then, did The Limits to Growth shock in 1972, and why does questioning growth today still provoke incredulity and anger? The report itself became something of an albatross for the green movement. The view entered folklore that it contained predictions about resource use that were alarmist and plain wrong. But, as New Scientist magazine reported recently, it was the critics of the book who turned out to be mistaken .... Clinging to economic growth suffocates the imagination AND the Planet we live on ! Ak Malten, Pro Peaceful Energy Use Clinging to economic growth suffocates the imagination More info on "The Limits to Growth" can be found at: http://limits-to-growth.org/ "The Limits to Growth" Editions: ISBN 0-87663-165-0, 1972 First edition ISBN 0-87663-222-3, 1974 Second edition (cloth) ISBN 0-87663-918-X, 1974 Second edition (paperback) ISBN 978-1931498586, ASIN 1-931498-58-X, 2004 Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update For a greener planet website  For a greener planet ( blog - this blog in: Atom - RSS ) More websites by Ak Malten