Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet (MIT Press)
Kerryn Higgs
Language: English
Pages: 416
ISBN: 0262529696
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The notion of ever-expanding economic growth has been promoted so relentlessly that "growth" is now entrenched as the natural objective of collective human effort. The public has been convinced that growth is the natural solution to virtually all social problems -- poverty, debt, unemployment, and even the environmental degradation caused by the determined pursuit of growth. Meanwhile, warnings by scientists that we live on a finite planet that cannot sustain infinite economic expansion are ignored or even scorned. In Collision Course, Kerryn Higgs examines how society's commitment to growth has marginalized scientific findings on the limits of growth, casting them as bogus predictions of imminent doom.
Higgs tells how in 1972, The Limits to Growth -- written by MIT researchers Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and William Behrens III -- found that unimpeded economic growth was likely to collide with the realities of a finite planet within a century. Although the book's arguments received positive responses initially, before long the dominant narrative of growth as panacea took over. Higgs explores the resistance to ideas about limits, tracing the propagandizing of "free enterprise," the elevation of growth as the central objective of policy makers, the celebration of "the magic of the market," and the ever-widening influence of corporate-funded think tanks -- a parallel academic universe dedicated to the dissemination of neoliberal principles and to the denial of health and environmental dangers from the effects of tobacco to global warming. More than forty years after The Limits to Growth, the idea that growth is essential continues to hold sway, despite the mounting evidence of its costs -- climate destabilization, pollution, intensification of gross global inequalities, and depletion of the resources on which the modern economic edifice depends.
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At the feast. His ruminations on population flowed from these preoccupations. To be “Malthusian” (i.e., like Malthus) thus involves several key elements over and above a fear of exploding population, and these are more central to his ideas than the population theme. They include resistance to notions of social improvement and social welfare, punitive policies for the poor, a tendency to blame the poor for their own plight, and recourse to speculative theorizing in the service of an essentially.
Mined the groundwater, much of which will not be replenished during the lifetimes of the living. The Limits to Growth Debate 47 Box 3.2 (continued) Notes a. George 1976, 93; Douthwaite 1999, 250. b. George 1976, 172. Ownership of land in third world countries is often heavily concentrated in elite hands, partly an effect of colonialism. In 1996, for example, 2 percent of Guatemala’s people held 63 percent of the good land, and 0.8 percent of Brazil’s owned 43 percent (Athanasiou 1996, 54).
His excellent history of the rise of PR, Ewen interviewed Bernays himself in 1990, not long before he turned ninety-nine. Ewen found Bernays, a key pioneer of the new PR profession, to be just as candid about his underlying motivations as he had been in 1928 when he wrote Propaganda: Throughout our conversation, Bernays conveyed his hallucination of democracy: A highly educated class of opinion-molding tacticians is continuously at work … adjusting the mental scenery from which the public mind,.
(indigenous or tribal people). As anthropologist Felix Padel and political ecologist Samarendra Das have reported, In India, industrialisation has already displaced an estimated 60 million villagers in the past 60 years.… A shocking 75 percent comprised Adivasis and Dalits. Very few of them have been adequately compensated; most report no improvement in their standard of living though such displacement is unabashedly presented as a precursor to development. The poverty that they have been reduced.
Economic growth the task of human social improvement; mainstream economists remain confident that a largely urbanized world population of nine or ten billion can be supported. Mainstream economics, however, has rarely considered land reform as a possible path to rural well-being. The UN/DESA report quoted above does not examine the relationship between rural poverty and landlessness and consequently ignores the influence of the distribution of land on rural poverty and the possibility that people.