> Growth is great if everyone involved in the system has a fair opportunity to partake in that growth Not really. We're so far beyond the carrying capacity of

> Growth is great if everyone involved in the system has a fair opportunity to partake in that growth Not really. We're so far beyond the carrying capacity of our planet already that our natural systems are collapsing at a dizzying pace. More growth = faster collapse. For a mix of personal and professional reasons I'm in touch with many experts in specific ecologies throughout mainly SE Asia, Australia, and W.Europe. Nearly every one is in one of a spectrum of states between panic and depression, because the systems they are studying are collapsing fast enough to be very obviously discernible within their own career span (these are people in their 30s to 50s). This is pretty well known to us in Australia, which has had astonishingly fast population growth, so that now many retirees can see the collapse for themselves. All the Queensland inshore reefs that they used to visit on school holidays, for example, have now disappeared. Those studying the offshore reefs tell us that they will also be dead in a few decades. This is repeated for all our land ecosystems, from the tropical savannahs to the Southern highlands. Many people cloistered in the parasitic virtual worlds of business and cities think of this as something that won't affect them. It's something seperate, 'the environment', that they only see on holidays and in documentaries. Yet the world's climate on which agriculture depends is also collapsing fast. Topsoil is being blown and washed away. Fresh water is disappearing. We're three or four bad seasons (which are ever harder to predict) away from disaster. Ongoing growth is incompatible with the continuing existence of a living planet.