Comments, Ideas and The Work To Do

Probably the biggest challenge to bona fide progressive sustainable population advocates is overcoming the dominant cultural assertion that our economy must be physically growing to accommodate an adequate quality of life for the participants of that economy.

Look no further than a post on the Crossing Wall Street blog that is very coherent in as far as it goes:

http://www.crossingwallstreet.com/archives/2009/04/population_grow.html

The author can't quite accept that a long-term population decline could coincide with "positive economic growth". If "positive economic growth" is the result of aggregate increases in resource extraction, widgets created and externalized costs multiplied, then perhaps there is reason for the author's doubt.

He does he hit the nail on the head exquisitely, though, with this line: "...per-capita wealth... is very different from a growing economy." Read in context of his entire post, this line seems to be dismissive of the idea of a population declining to sustainable levels as measured by its ecological footprint.

However, isn't this intellectual disconnect really what has happened en masse on the planet? People have evolved to the point where they believe that a "growing economy" is so important that the concept of "increasing per capita wealth" should be thrown under the bus if the two happen to face off in the town square.

The false question is this: "Can an economy 'grow' with a population in long term decline?" Who cares?!!

The question is really this: "Is the international community, in the face of the planetary ecological catastrophe unfolding in real-time, clever enough to engineer an economy that is accommodative of sustaining per capita standard of living that is above the poverty line for 6.7 billion human beings residing on the planet (and growing by a quarter million people per day) -- while operating within the ecological capacities of the planet Earth such that those capacities are not permanently degraded"?

Yes? No? Maybe?