Are we growing an economy or a cancer?

The growth model needs treatment before it kills us.

Jakarta, Indonesia where twenty-six percent of the urban population lives in slums and only thirty-five percent have access to potable water. By Jonathan McIntosh (Own work) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Ecological philosopher Edward Abbey once declared “growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” He was referring to the ever-diminishing wild places of his beloved Arizona, replaced by sprawling subdivisions that housed a ballooning population of retirees, alongside massive mining and oil operations run by multinationals.

When Abbey’s essay, “The Blob Comes To Arizona” was written in 1976, Arizona was the fastest growing state in the Union. Out of concern for the impact such a rapid rate of growth was having on the ecology of the high desert, Abbey sought some answers from the governor at the time, Raul Castro.

“I tried to pin the Governor down on the question of just how much growth is good and how much is too much? At what point, I wanted to know, should we in Arizona draw the line? The Governor would not be pinned. Dismissing the question as hypothetical — and of course it is hypothetical, that’s why I asked it — he went on with other matters.”

In 1976, when the nation was just coming out of a recession, economists, scientists and policymakers dared not even consider his question: “how much growth is too much?”