It’s the stupid economy
This is a letter to the Listener editor by George Preddey which expresses clearly the basis of our action.
The most important change on Earth recently has been the growth of the global economy. Politicians and economists see no limits to economic growth. Despite warnings from scientists that unfettered economic growth is killing the planet, politicians are desperately pouring trillions of public money into a failed financial system. Unfettered economic growth is driving air and water pollution, climate change, peak oil, and deforestation - and a mega-extinction of species that is unprecedented since the asteroidal impact 65m years ago that killed off the dinosaurs.
Growing the global economy in response to a financial crisis driven by excessive consumption in over-developed countries - and causing famine in under-developed countries - is irrational and immoral. The ‘trickle-down’ argument that economic growth eradicates poverty is both self-serving and fallacious. Indeed scientists warn that Earth’s biosphere is incapable of supporting the current global economy - let alone an economy that continues to expand. A steady-state economy may appear a radical concept but the alternative – an economy that is structurally required to grow beyond Earth’s ability to sustain it - is completely irrational.
The good news is that switching from a work-dominated and materially-encumbered lifestyle to a more sustainable lifestyle in which people worked, produced, and consumed less might actually increase human happiness. It took just days for governments world-wide to abandon decades of (unsustainable) free market growth economics to rescue Earth’s financial system from complete meltdown. How long will it take the same governments to recognise that economic growth is unsustainable on a finite planet - and to rescue Earth’s life support system from complete meltdown by (sustainable) green economics?
