Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist."
- Kenneth Boulding


The economy is making the news a lot lately. Since the bursting of the mortgage bubble in 2007 and the subsequent ongoing financial crisis, which in the UK has seen over £850 billion taken from the public to prop up the banks that caused the problem in the first place. The media is playing it’s predictable role in keeping the public misinformed by referring to the money rolling in to RBS, Lloyds TSB and Barclays as 'profits', they aren't profits, they are debts to us - Those 'profits' are the same cash being cut from education, healthcare, and other public services. Regardless of the disinformation, people are becoming increasingly aware that there’s something very wrong with this picture.

What is mentioned less often is the effect the economy of mass consumption and growth is having on our ecology: In the last 24 hours, over 200,000 acres of rainforest were destroyed. Thirteen million tons of toxic chemicals were released. Forty-five thousand people died of starvation, thirty-eight thousand of them children. Up to two hundred plant and animal species went extinct. Half the world’s tropical and temperate forests are now gone. About half the wetlands and a third of the mangroves are gone. An estimated 90 percent of the large predator fish are gone, and 75 percent of marine fisheries are now overfished or fished to capacity. Species are disappearing at rates about a thousand times faster than normal. The planet has not seen such a spasm of extinction in sixty-five million years; when the dinosaurs disappeared. And it’s because of us. At current levels of growing consumption and population, we‘ll need another three to five planets if we are to survive the coming century.

Clearly there is something very wrong with this picture, but how did we end up in this position? Could it be that we have lost a vital connection to the planet? For the first time there are now more people living in cities than in the country. There are children born today who will never set foot on soil, completely divorced from the natural world. One UK study showed that schoolchildren thought milk came from bottles. Well-meaning economists claiming to care about the environment have worked out the planet's financial value: $33 trillion per annum. That people would even consider putting a price tag on the living world of which we are part, and on which we rely, is an indication of how far off the edge we've gone. The collapse of the Kyoto and Copenhagen meetings may have been a foregone conclusion, as to make moves to slow or halt climate change would drastically impact economic growth. Clearly, in the minds of those well-meaning economists, profit is more important than the planet. As Hugo Chavez observed, “if the climate was a bank, they would already have saved it”.


At its base, economics is about how people relate with the land and with one another, in the process of fulfilling their material wants and needs. The words economics and ecology both derive from the Greek oikos; meaning home. So why is it that we have a global economy that is so at odds with its ecology? Everything in the universe is cyclical, the water cycle, the seasons, the cycle of birth, growth, death and decomposition, our orbiting the sun, the birth and death of stars – this also applies to the constant yo-yo ‘boom and bust’ of our economy. It’s a fundamental law of physics; what goes up, must indeed come down. The framers of our economy seem to ignore this simple fact. Politicians and economists acknowledge we need to do something to save the environment; and that is a start. But they act within the boundary of the current ideology, stating that we need ‘sustainable growth’. But sustainable growth is an oxymoron. An infinite growth economy in a finite ecology cannot be sustained. If something is unsustainable, then by definition, it is going to end. Yet few in mainstream discourse seem to make the vital link between continual economic growth, and continuing ecological destruction. To the disciples of economics, a genuinely sustainable way of living seems static, or ‘stagnant’ which carries negative connotations. Whereas our current system based on growth is thought of as ‘dynamic’, which is assumed to be a positive thing. During the inevitable bust periods of this economic model, it is often referred to as ‘negative growth’, the growth mantra seemingly must be maintained at any cost, without question. We can criticize the ineptitude and corruption of politicians, or complain about the greed of banks and corporations, but to shine a light on the entire system, to discuss the possibility that a different way is urgently needed, is taboo. Unthinkable.

Our current collapsing financial system was designed in a time of assumed infinite resources.
But unlike the time of the Great Depression, we no longer have unlimited resources. All of the finite support systems on which modern civilization depends are being used up – gas; water; fertile land; minerals, and most importantly, our civilization’s lifeblood: oil. We are facing ‘peak everything’. We cannot rebuild, consume or spend our way out of this Great Depression. We have to find another way. The current economic model is not a natural law, nor is it graven in stone. It is an artificial creation, one that can be dismantled if it is not serving the global community, both non-human and human. And it is not. We need what scientist James Lovelock calls a ‘sustainable retreat’, a transition away from our current level of consumption, and the current model of economic growth. This will take not only a move toward a simpler, less materialistic way of life, but nothing less than a paradigm shift in our consciousness, a radical rethinking of our relationship with the Earth on which our lives depend, with each other and ultimately with ourselves.

Change, on an unimaginable scale, is coming whether we want it or not. Unfortunately, the people who run the economic system are unlikely to respond rationally to it, and the media will ensure people remain largely ignorant and distracted. Instead of talking about peak oil, people will be complaining about rising petrol prices, instead of discussing alternatives to this insane economy, they'll be talking about the ensuing unemployment, high food prices, immigration, crime, terrorism. Unable to see the woods for the trees, the public will miss the biggest factor causing these problems. The sooner people understand the situation we are in, the sooner we can organise, the sooner we can act - and the less painful the transition will be. There are already embryonic movements working to disengage from the model of globalization and growth, toward localization and sustainability. Climate Camps are thriving around the UK, educating and organising on the issues of climate and sustainability. In Latin America grassroots movements are rejecting the model imposed from the North, and regaining a connection with their indigenous roots. The Transition Town initiative is quietly gaining global momentum.

The coming decades are a crucial time for our species, and the challenges we face are enormous. To alter an ideology and a system so entrenched as to go largely unnoticed; let alone unquestioned, may feel like felling an elephant with a toothpick. But the destructive paradigm of perpetual growth may be the one elephant in the room that truly must come down.