'Economic growth' is a really slippery concept because the precise meaning of 'growth' matters a lot to the overall picture. Growth can be steady-state or not

'Economic growth' is a really slippery concept because the precise meaning of 'growth' matters a lot to the overall picture. Growth can be steady-state or not - for example, the global biosphere 'grows' by about 100 gigatons of carbon per year due to photosynthesis, but also 'dies' by about the same amount, due to breakdown of organic matter to CO2 by insects, fungi etc. In contrast, biological succession on a volcanic island, from bare rock to a dense cover of rainforest, results in an accumalation of biomass until a new steady state is reached. That accumulation-phase growth is very different from the steady-state dynamic condition. Economically, 'growth' (as used in the article) seems to refer to the accumulation-phase (*say, the accumulation of capital). Now if your capital-accumulation model is to chop down a forest, sell the wood, build housing, move in a farm and a town, and become an agricultural-industrial center operating under steady-state economic conditions (little capital accumulation, but lots of capital movement) - OK, eventually you run out of forest for your accumulation-of-capital model. The thing is, humans can do perfectly well with the steady-state economic-ecological model, given that the total human population remains stable. Here, however, competition is a bit rougher - the success of one entity in a steady-state system means the decline of another, there are far fewer open horizons. Nevertheless an individual company can experience 'economic growth' in this situation (someone else gets 'economic death', aka loss of market share). Evolution comes into play here, so we'd hope that competition in a steady-state system would select for efficiency, quality, etc. In contrast, doubling the human population could mean doubling the demand for goods and services. That would be accumulative growth, and economic growth is always the desirable good thing, certainly...? Accumulative growth on a finite planet is, obviously enough, not going to go on forever. The only point to consider is how close we are to reaching that limit, and what kind of average quality of life (including access to untouched wilderness) we'd like to enjoy.