beotch101 said: Except that technological advancement means that the same amount of resources can fulfill the needs of a much larger population. The delusion resides in evading this obvious truth. It is apparent in innovations from farming to the industrial rev.
I do not understand how the same amount of natural resources, which are continually being degraded from low-entropy sources to high-entropy wastes as I understand from the laws of thermodynamics, can sustain economic growth which is driven by infinite desires without regard for the biophysical limits of the the surrounding biosphere.
What I advocate is a steady state economy because, as Herman Daly describes in Steady-State Economics:
“The entire evolution of the biosphere has occurred around a fixed point – the constant solar-energy budget. Modern man is the only species to have broken the solar-income budget constraint, and this has thrown him out of ecological equilibrium with the rest of the biosphere. Natural cycles have become overloaded, and new materials have been produced for which no natural cycles exist. Not only is geological capital being depleted but the basic life-support services of nature are impaired in their functioning by too large a throughput from the human sector.”
If you don’t agree, no problem, I have simply researched ecological economics and happen to find it not only sensible, but necessary to understand as we go along.
