Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet by Tim Jackson

Tim Jackson is Professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Surrey and Director of the ESRC Research Group on Lifestyles, Values and Environment (RESOLVE). Funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council, the aim of RESOLVE is to develop a robust understanding of the links between lifestyle, societal values and the environment, and to provide evidence-based advice to policy-makers seeking to influence people’s lifestyles and practices. Tim also directs the newly-awarded Defra/ESRC Sustainable Lifestyles Research Group (SLRG).

[...]Tim Jackson states the challenge starkly: "Questioning growth is deemed to be the act of lunatics, idealists and revolutionaries. But question it we must." And that is the core mission of this perfectly timed book. Had he published it before the financial crisis, he would probably have been dismissed as another green idealist, at best. But in the wake of the crisis, more people are questioning the primacy of growth at all costs. President Sarkozy, the Nobel-prizewinning economist Joseph Stiglitz and elements of the Financial Times's commentariat are among those now arguing that prosperity is possible without GNP growth, and indeed that prosperity will soon become impossible because of GNP growth. A new movement seems to be emerging, and this superbly written book should be the first stop for anyone wanting a manifesto.

Jackson, who is economics commissioner on the UK government's Sustainable Development Commission, skilfully makes the relevant economic arguments understandable to the lay reader. He is not slow to simplify where that is warranted: "The idea of a non-growing economy may be an anathema to an economist. But the idea of a continually growing economy is an anathema to an ecologist."

This is the core of the debate. Endless growth is a ridiculous notion to the typical ecologist because we live on a planet with finite resources, the mining and use of some of which is undermining our planet's life-support systems. But the typical economist believes we can "decouple" GNP growth from resource use through the increased efficiency that tends to be intrinsic to capitalism: that we can grow our economies and reverse environmental degradation too. Tesco, as it were, can keep building more stores for ever, provided they are increasingly resource-efficient.

(Written by Jeremy Legget )

Ecologize Growth

Ecologize Growth from StormCloud Media on Vimeo.

Stuart Valentine - Money and Life Movie

Stuart Valentine interview from StormCloud Media on Vimeo.

more on this from www.moneyandlifemovie.com

Prof.William Rees of UBC - Growth & Human intelligence

Prof. Rees of UBC talked on 'human-intelligence' as tool to understand [economic] growth.

Steven Earl SALMONY on Growth

According to a growing body of data, increasing per capita consumption of limited natural resources, a seemingly endless expansion of production capabilities in a finite world, and the skyrocketing rise in absolute global human population numbers are occurring synergistically on the surface of Earth and could be patently unsustainable at their current scale and rate of growth.

Because the global growth of human over-consumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities are a source of continuously deepening concern, and occasionally awaken me in the middle of the night, I have been regularly sending dozens of letters to editors, hundreds of missives into the blogosphere and thousands of e-mails into cyberspace. Always the theme is the same. It is simply this: Earth's body is finite, its resources are limited, and its ecosystem services capable of irreversible degradation by the huge scale and anticipated growth of human over-consumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities, the ones we see rampantly overspreading the surface of our planetary home in our time. Earth does not resemble a mother's teat at which the human species may forever suckle. Despite the assurances of many economists and politicians, Earth is not a cornucopia. No possible way.
The unbridled growth of the human species presents a colossal challenge to the family of humanity. The Earth as a constant, seemingly endless provider of whatsoever human beings desire is a fantasy ... a widely shared, consensually validated, distinctly human product of wishful and magical thinking ... a chimera spawned from economic expediency, political convenience and human greed, I suppose.

The Full Seas Act and the College of the 21st Century - by Brian Czech

We just can’t have a perpetually growing population, perpetually growing consumption, or perpetually growing economy. To think there is no limit to growth on a finite planet (Earth comes to mind) is equivalent to thinking we could have a stabilized economy on a perpetually diminishing planet. In other words, we could gradually squish the $70 trillion global economy into one continent, then one nation, then one city… you get the picture. It’s becoming an “information economy,” right? So eventually we could squish it into your blackberry, leaving the rest of the planet as a designated wilderness area![...]

The Tyranny of Entitlement | Derrick Jensen | Orion Magazine

Derrick Jensen

Endgame

I’M CONTINUALLY stunned by how many seemingly sane people believe you can have infinite economic growth on a finite planet. Perpetual economic growth and its cousin, limitless technological expansion, are beliefs so deeply held by so many in this culture that they often go entirely unquestioned. Even more disturbing is the fact that these beliefs are somehow seen as the ultimate definition of what it is to be human: perpetual economic growth and limitless technological expansion are what we do. ~ Derrick Jensen