Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet

Collision Course

Collision Course

Endless Growth on a Finite Planet

Kerryn Higgs

The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England

© 2014 Kerryn Higgs

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Higgs, Kerryn, 1946–

Collision course : endless growth on a finite planet / Kerryn Higgs.

   p.  cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-262-02773-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-262-32092-4 (retail e-book)

1. Economic history—1971–1990. 2. Economic history—1990– 3. Economic development—Moral and ethical aspects. 4. Economic policy—Moral and ethical aspects. 5. Free enterprise. 6. Sustainable development. I. Title.

HC59.H523 2014

330.9—dc23

2014003794

For Meg and Freddy,

in the hope that the world you inherit

will come to its senses soon.

If we are concerned about our great appetite for materials, it is plausible to seek to increase the supply, to decrease waste, to make better use of the stocks that are available, and to develop substitutes. But what of the appetite itself? Surely this is the ultimate source of the problem. If it continues its geometric course, will it not one day have to be restrained? Yet in the literature of the resource problem this is the forbidden question. Over it hangs a nearly total silence. It is as though, in the discussion of the chance for avoiding automobile accidents, we agree not to make any mention of speed!

—John Kenneth Galbraith, 1958

Contents

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations and Acronyms

Introduction

I    Growth and Its Challengers

1    Economic Growth: Origins

2    Economic Growth: Perceptions

3    The Limits to Growth Debate: Precursors and Beginnings

4    
The Limits to Growth
and Its Critics

II    Chasing Growth

5    Growth and Consumerism

6    The Rise of Free Market Fundamentalism

7    “Development” and Globalization: Exporting Growth

8    Growth and “Sustainable Development”

9    Growth and Its Outcomes for the Poor

III    Persuading the People

10    Propaganda: “Business Finds Its Voice”

11    Sleight of the Invisible Hand

12    The Free Market Assault on Environmental Science

13    International Brakes on Environmental Priorities

IV    In Conclusion

14    
The Limits to Growth
after Forty Years

15    Conclusion: The Planet and the Pie

Appendix: Selected Critics of Growth, 2013

Notes

References

Index

Acknowledgments

A work of synthesis such as this would have been impossible without the research conducted by many others. To them I owe a great debt, both for their illuminating analysis and for having trawled through segments of the vast primary source material and pointed me in the right directions.

Thanks to all those who read parts of the early drafts—Barbara Bloch, Mary O’Sullivan, Barney Foran, Steve Keen, Laurene Kelly, Graham Wells, and Margot Oliver, as well as to Stan Malinowitz, for running an economist’s eye over the final draft of chapter 6. Thanks to Dennis Meadows for providing his historical perspective on the World3 model; to all those who gave permission to include their graphs and tables; and to Riley Dunlap, Ross Buckley, Ramachandra Guha, Rogate Mshana, Bob Ward, Cliff Cobb, Sharon Beder, Pasquale Tridico, Jesse Ausubel, TRK Somaiya, Sharan Burrow and the secretariats of Eurostep and the Club of Rome for prompt and helpful answers to email inquiries. Thanks also to Miranda Martin, Clay Morgan, Deborah Cantor-Adams, and Marjorie Pannell at the MIT Press for their help in seeing the work to publication.

Special thanks to Natasha Topschij for creating the map in figure 9.1, and to the people who read major parts of the original text and offered their thoughts on many aspects—Jen St. Clair, who shares a lifelong enthusiasm for the limits ideas, and Pete Hay, who advised on several versions of the initial draft and gave unfailing encouragement and perceptive critique.

Very special thanks to Harriet Malinowitz, who insisted that my unending research should be written up, commented on drafts at many stages, and gave generously of her time and energy to assist with the revision and re-editing of the entire book over her summer break in 2013.

Thanks, too, to the School of Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Tasmania for its support, and to the UTAS library staff, who were ever reliable, well beyond the call of duty. Special thanks to the staff at Document Delivery, Launceston; they were terrific, and the research would have been impossible without them.

Abbreviations and Acronyms

Introduction

Since the middle of the twentieth century, the scale of the human enterprise has rapidly escalated, and with it the exploitation of the natural world as a source of raw materials and a sink for the disposal of waste. Though the roots of this explosion lie in the history of the last five hundred years at least (in the rise of capitalism, European colonialism, Enlightenment science, and the Industrial Revolution), the associated disruption of the global biosphere has become evident only over the last half century.