The reason we are emotionally attached to growth and why we find it so hard to say it should stop is that everybody feels that if they had a little bit more of something they would be better off. What we fail to realize is that what is possible for one person is probably not possible for all and if everything gets a little bit more it may alter or destroy not only the expected benefits but also those that people enjoyed before the change. Until a few years ago the Algarve was a pleasant holiday destination, accessible only to a few. Now it appears in every package tout catalogue and hotels have been built where almond groves once stood. The region has completely altered, some would say for the worse, and many people who once spent springtime there have found somewhere more distant to go instead. Perhaps the Algarve provides more consumer satisfaction now because economic growth has enabled more people to go there but it is not offering the same product that it did. Because the place and the clientele have changed, objective comparisons are impossible. Without making value judgments we cannot say whether growth has made things better or worse.- Richard Douthwaite (1992)
By 1980 all power is likely to be virtually costless.- Henry R. Luce, The Fabulous Future (1956)
Each society honors its live conformists and dead troublemakers.- Mignon McCarthy, novelist
If a man should walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded a loafer, but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.- Henry Thoreau, Life Without Principle
The following table shows per capita consumption [of oil] of some representative countries. The United States heads the list of wasteful consumers, but it is curious that Ireland, a small European country, should be almost as bad. It presumably reflects the recent prosperity, which leaves the towns and roads choked with traffic. Population density may also be a factor: people in sparsely populated rural areas may be more dependent on transport over longer distances. The Indians have found out how to live on very little oil, which makes them better prepared for the future. It would be interesting to develop a happiness factor and ask if there is reason to think that Indians in their daily lives are less happy than the citizens of the United States? Rather, it may be that change is the difficult challenge: the profligate may find it hard to become parsimonious, resorting to violence in their frustration.- Colin J. Campbell, Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) Newsletter (2003)
Empty-handed we came into the world, and empty-handed, beyond question, we must leave it; if we have food and clothing to last us out, let us be content with that. Those who would be rich fall into temptation, the devil’s trap for them; all those useless and dangerous appetites which sink men into ruin here and perdition hereafter. The love of money is a root from which every kind of evil spring.- First Timothy, 6:7-10
The tendency and the result of the capitalist mode of production is steadily to increase the productivity of labour. Hence it also increases the mass of the means of production converted into products by the use of the same quantity of additional labour. This additional labour is then distributed progressively over a greater mass of products, thus reducing the price of each individual commodity and commodity prices in general.... It follows from this that, with the development of capitalist production and the resultant reduction in prices, there must be an increase in the quantity of goods, in the number of articles that must be sold. That is to say, a constant expansion of the market becomes a necessity for capitalist production.- Karl Marx (1867)
When the enemy is nature, in other words, rather than another social class, it is at least imaginable that adjustments could be made that would be impossible in ordinary circumstances.- Robert Heilbroner, American Social Philosopher
How many people the earth can support is the wrong question to be asking. Rather, we should be asking if we already have enough people and perhaps too many people. If the neoclassical economic model is right - that each additional person is a valuable worker, consumer, contributor to the GNP, and stimulator of innovative technologies that can substitute for all natural resources - then we have nothing to worry about as the population grows. If the second law of technodynamics is correct - that the increasingly difficult challenges of consuming nonsubstitutable resources, providing food, and disposing of garbage for a rapidly expanding population leaves us and future generations with fewer options and more problems to resolve - then we already have too many people on earth.- Eric A. Davidson, Economics As If Ecology Mattered (2000)
Drastically reduced travel and speed are not easy pills to swallow, but we have no choice. The math and dwindling high-energy resources will make changes inevitable. If we control the coming change, we will still have a minimal amount of fossil fuel left for national security, municipal needs, and emergency travel. Life won't be that bad, our great grandparents survived without moving too fast, got good exercise, and met their neighbors.- John Howe, The End of Fossil Energy (2004)
If every company on the planet were to adopt the best environmental practices of the "leading companies -say, the Body Shop, Patagonia, or 3M - the world would still be moving toward sure degradation and collapse. So if a tiny fraction of the world's most intelligent managers cannot model a sustainable world, then environmentalism as currently practiced by business today, laudable as it may be, is only a part of an overall solution. Rather than a management problem, we have a design problem, a flaw that runs through all business.- Paul Hawken (1993)
Development - not in the abstract formulas of the second volume of Capital , which retains all their significance as a stage in analysis , but in historical reality - took place and could only take place by a systematic expansion of its base. In the process of its development, and consequently in the struggle with its internal contradictions, every national capitalism turns in an ever-increasing degree to the reserves of the "external market," that is, the reserves of the world economy. The uncontrollable expansion growing out of the permanent internal crises of capitalism constitutes a progressive force up to the time when it turns into a force fatal to capitalism.- Leon Trotsky (1930)
Thus, on issue after issue, many of our friends and allies take a point of view almost completely contrary to our own. Are they idiots? Wimps? Corrupt? While it would be comforting to suppose so, the fact is that it is usually we who are the odd man out. As a nation, we are an outlier. We often don’t realize it because of our very size, which tends to blinker our view of others, and of our power, which allows us to assume that our standard or our view is the globally dominant one, or should be. (Thus, on a parochial level, we cling to miles, inches, and Fahrenheit degrees even though the rest of the world long ago moved to the far simpler metric system.) The really perverse aspect of this phenomenon is that because of our power, the rest of the world accommodates us, thereby enabling us to remain blinkered.- Clyde Prestowitz, Rogue Nation (2003)
I make some rather catastrophic prognostications about U.S. power and U.S. society, without trying to predict exactly how they will come to pass. For those of us in the metropoles, who don't understand that this collapse has already happened all over the world, we will probably see its first form as deflation. But I can't be sure. We just need to understand that it is real, it is here, and it is now. Just not for us, yet. We are not the norm. We are not the center of the universe.
Do white Americans have to be reduced to dollar-a-day subsistence before dollar-a-day subsistence is a real collapse?
- Stan Goff, Full Spectrum Disorder (2003)
The end of industrialism may lead us to be both more critical and at the same time more understanding of human foibles – more critcal because we see writ large the results of greed and unrestrained competition; more understanding because it is clear that we humans are, at least to a very large degree, simply animals responding to biological urges and environmental circumstances. Our vaunted moral and intellectual capabilities may enable us to alter our behavior, but perhaps only within narrow limits. What those limits are remains to be seen. If ever we have had an opportunity to prove our specialness as a species, our ability to collectively exert moral and intellectual faculties to overcome genetic programming and environmental conditioning through intelligent self-limitation, it is now.- Richard Heinberg, The Party’s Over (2003)
The world's present industrial civilization is handicapped by the coexistence of two universal, overlapping, and incompatible intellectual systems: the accumulated knowledge of the last four centuries of the properties and interrelationships of matter and energy; and the associated monetary culture which has evolved from folkways of prehistoric origin.
The first of these two systems has been responsible for the spectacular rise, principally during the last two centuries, of the present industrial system and is essential for its continuance. The second, an inheritance from the prescientific past, operates by rules of its own having little in common with those of the energy-matter system. Nevertheless, the monetary system, by means of a loose coupling, exercises a general control over the matter-energy system upon which it is superimposed.
Despite their inherent incompatibilities, these two systems during the last two centuries have had one fundamental characteristic in common, namely exponential growth, which has made a reasonably stable coexistence possible. But, for whatever reasons, it is impossible for the matter-energy system to sustain exponential growth for more than a few tens of doublings, and this phase is by now almost over. The monetary system has no such constraints, and, according to one of its most fuindamental rules, it must continue to grow by compound interest.
- M. King Hubbert, petroleum engiseer (1981)
Unless we take these steps and begin to swing into them soon--unless in short, man readjusts his way of living, in its fullest sense, to the imperatives imposed by the limited resources of his environment--we may as well give up all hope of continuing civilized life. Like Gadarene swine, we shall rush down a war-torn slope to a barbarian existence in the blackened rubble.'- William Vogt, Road to Survival (1948)
If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.- Herbert Stein, economist (1979)
The world's resources are finite? That doesn't mean that the world is "full" or couldn't hold a lot more people. Too much pollution in the atmosphere? Too much wastes in the oceans? So? That isn't as important as human life. It would be worth some pollution to have more people alive, and as population growth drives technology growth, the pollution would eventually be cleaned up anyways, even as populations continue to grow. We can't drink ocean water anyways, so the ocean is a far better place to dump sewage than in rivers, without first treating it. We already see that in the United States. We have more people than ever, and yet pollution is declining. Land would be exploited too much? Huh? Well what else is land for? If there are more people, of course we build more homes, schools, roads, or whatever the people need. The world could deal with more cities and towns being built, or cities growing larger and larger, to hold all the more people.- “Pronatalist” in the Overpopulation.com discussion list (1/9/04)
There is no greater calamity
Than not knowing what is enough
There is no greater fault
Than desire for success
Therefore,
Knowing that enough is enough
Is always
Enough- Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
The big corporations, our clients, are scared shitless of the environmental movement.... They sense that there’s a majority out there and that the emotions are all on the other side – if they can be heard. They think the politicians are going to yield up to the emotions. I think the corporations are wrong about that. I think the companies will have to give in only at insignificant levels. Because the companies are too strong, they’re the establishment. The environmentalists are going to have to be like the mob in the square in Romania before they prevail.- Frank Mankiewicz, public relations executive (1992)
Shell caused a furore in investment circles by downgrading its reported Reserves by 20%, namely 2.7 Gb for oil and 7.2 Tcf for gas, causing the shares to fall in value by about 10% in three days. The Company’s Chairman, Phil. Watts, came in for a much criticism. The amazing scale of payments to such luminaries was also revealed: the unfortunate Watts of Shell gets only $2.7 million a year, compared with Browne of BP at $8.4 and Raymond of ExxonMobil at $25.8 million. The beautiful palace and gardens at Versailles, built by Louis XIV in an earlier epoch of excessive privilege, survive for the enjoyment of later generations. Watts is described by the Wall Street Journal as a keen gardener, so there is hope yet.- Colin J. Campbell, The Association for the Study of Peak Oil/Gas (ASPO) newsletter (2004)
Hope may exist or it may not exist. It is like a road across the earth. For actually, there were no roads on the earth, but when many men pass one way, a road is made.- Lu Xun, Chinese author, in his story "My Old Home" (1922)
Aware of the growing deterioration and reduction of land and water resources, of the famines in many countries, of the indifference and wastage in consumer societies and the educational and health problems facing the world population, one could imagine that if all of these problems are not solved our human society might become one where its members devour each other.
It would be a good idea to ask the Olympic champions of human rights in the West if they have ever used a single minute to reflect on these realities, which to a very large degree are the result of the current economic and social system. It would be worth asking them how they feel about a system that, instead of educating the masses as a fundamental element for making progress in the search for urgently needed, viable solutions, with the support of science, technology and culture, spends one trillion dollars every year on alienating consumerist advertising. With the money spent in just one of those years to spread this peculiar poison, all the illiterate and semi-illiterate people in the world could be taught to read and write and even reach ninth grade in less than ten years and no poor child would have to go without schooling. Without education and other social services, crime and drug abuse can never be reduced or eradicated. This we proclaim from Cuba, a country blockaded for 45 years, accused and condemned more than a few times in Geneva by the United States and their closest allies but which is about to provide health, education and cultural development services the like of which the developed and rich West has never even dreamed of and, what is more, these are absolutely free for all citizens, with no exceptions whatsoever.
- Fidel Castro, on the 45th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution (2004)
Our country and state have a special obligation to work toward the stabilization of our own population so as to credibly lead other parts of the world toward population stabilization.- Ronald Reagan, as Governor of California (1974)
"To grow" means to increase in size by the accretion or assimilation of material. "Growth" therefore means a quantitative increase in the scale of the physical dimensions of the economy. "To develop" means to expand or realize the potentialities of; to bring gradually to a fuller, greater or better state. "Development" therefore means the qualitative improvement in the structure, design and composition of the physical stocks of wealth that results from greater knowledge, both of technique and of purpose. A growing economy is getting bigger; a developing economy is getting better. An economy can therefore develop without growing or grow without developing.- Herman Daly (1996)
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