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Obsession with growth is destroying nature, 150 countries warn

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Re: Obsession with growth is destroying nature, 150 countries warn

#181

Post by pibaker »

greygoo222 wrote: post #109
delegate wrote: post #84

When I was a child, I was spending my summers at my grandparents. They had a cozy house in the village. They worked the land, they had a few animals. They grew their food. They sold some wine and fruit at the market. They had a big house, land, clean air, clean water and they were healthy. They celebrated the holidays, had many friends, went to church, weddings, funerals, etc. Villagers always greeted them and stoppe…

Your problem is that you were happy as a child and unhappy as an adult. That's a personal problem, and has little to do with rural or urban living. As other commenters have pointed out, you can most likely afford to buy a farm if you really want that lifestyle. I suspect you don't, because it sucks major ass to have to do manual labor all day, to eat almost entirely the same things and see the same people for decades…

> you can most likely afford to buy a farm if you really want that lifestyle

Revealed preference wins all the time.

See also the massive rural to urban migration in literally every country since 18th century Britain to present day Asia.

Re: Obsession with growth is destroying nature, 150 countries warn

#182

Post by myrmidon »

Arubis wrote: post #33

Folks, "Limits to Growth" was published _over fifty years ago_ ( https://www.clubofrome.org/ltg50/ ) and revisited repeatedly since, each time in so doing effectively confirming their worst-case hypotheses. Yes, their website is...unconvincing. Which is poetic in its own way. Wikipedia's take on the original report at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth is probably a better read. But we've been able to…

Looking at this somewhat critically, did the predictions not turn out to be completely incorrect?

Specifically the industrial output and food per person, as well as the "available ressources" curve.

In my view, this should have been expected from the very start. Every single fixed-reserve + extrapolated usage rate calculation that we ever did produced incorrect predictions from what I know (and I'm not even really exaggerating here); this happens because increasing scarcity provides a lot of backpressure against both assumptions.

Just consider e.g. fracking or oil sands for the "fixed reserves" of something like gas (from a 1970 perspective), and things like aluminium conductors for the "extrapolated use rate" for something like copper.

I'm not saying that the whole concept is wrong. Long term exponential growth is obviously going to run into a wall basically by definition.

But I think for humanity right now, current population trends (i.e. negative growth everywhere) is all we need to keep ressource usage physically possible for the next centuries at least (and probably going to cause negative economic growth simply from population decrease).

Re: Obsession with growth is destroying nature, 150 countries warn

#183

Post by modeless »

delegate wrote: post #108
modeless wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lifestyle you describe is very cheap and you can certainly afford it, if you wanted. There are plenty of rural small towns you could choose from. Why not do it if it's what you think you want?

You can't escape the rat race even if you hide in a cave these days. Life like that is no longer possible, at least not in Europe. I didn't write that to shame anyone. I happen to like my life in the city with all the negatives. But sometimes I think about this - is all this 'comfort' worth the destruction of nature ?

> Life like that is no longer possible

Completely false. In fact it wasn't easier back in the day. It was much harder. People back then just had hard lives.

Re: Obsession with growth is destroying nature, 150 countries warn

#184

Post by [deleted] »

lich_king wrote: post #172
ghurtado wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If we didn't have cities, we also wouldn't have eight billion people in the world. Could you break down the logic that leads you to this conclusion? Im sure it's deeper than "if cities disappeared right now, a lot of people would disappear with them"

Because the habitable surface of the planet is less than 100 million square kilometers and only a fraction of that is suitable for subsistence farming. The only reason we can accommodate 8 billion is that the majority of them live in high-density settlements and that food is grown on an industrial scale elsewhere.

[deleted]

Re: Obsession with growth is destroying nature, 150 countries warn

#185

Post by slibhb »

Degrowthism is one of the dominant ideologies of our time. I think it's wrong: economic growth is good, it has made our lives much better, and we should continue to prioritize it.

One important detail about % growth is that it compounds. So small differences in growth today can make a huge difference 50 years from now.

The world I want to live in is one that prioritizes protecting the environment but also aggressively pursues new technology and growth. Our descendants will thank us.

Re: Obsession with growth is destroying nature, 150 countries warn

#186

Post by ZenoArrow »

_2d30 wrote: post #79
ZenoArrow wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would be good to know which members of the EU are currently experiencing unchecked economic growth. All of them. You can see recent stats (from 2025) on GDP growth here, all the handful of countries with negative growth are outside the EU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_real_GDP_... You may be confusing fast growth with unchecked growth. If you see sustained YoY growth of a couple of percent…

If you're going to quibble about OP's implied definition of "unchecked economic growth", then you should at least provide a better one that isn't just "economic growth".

The "unchecked" in unchecked economic growth just refers to the fact that no one is applying the brakes to this growth, i.e. it's being allowed to continue uninterrupted. This is only a problem when you understand the downsides of continuing with business as usual (mainly linked to the damage to the natural world).

Re: Obsession with growth is destroying nature, 150 countries warn

#187

Post by ZenoArrow »

graemep wrote: post #143
ZenoArrow wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would be good to know which members of the EU are currently experiencing unchecked economic growth. All of them. You can see recent stats (from 2025) on GDP growth here, all the handful of countries with negative growth are outside the EU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_real_GDP_... You may be confusing fast growth with unchecked growth. If you see sustained YoY growth of a couple of percent…

According to your link the EU's growth rate is just 0.7% so only 25% growth in 35 years, and some of that will come from things that have little or no impact on nature, or reduce the impact on nature. For example, replacing a coal power plant with solar adds to GDP but reduces pollution.

> reduce the impact on nature

Less bad is not the same as good. For example, electricity from solar panels is less bad than electricity from fossil fuels but there's considerable disruption to the natural world to produce them, not least of which involves mining for raw materials. In the same vein, we're nowhere near reducing pollution to safe levels or even reducing our overall pollution, all we've managed so far is a reduction in the rate of growth of fossil fuel use, it's still going up YoY.

Re: Obsession with growth is destroying nature, 150 countries warn

#188

Post by 0xffff2 »

gnerd00 wrote: post #142
selectodude wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We stopped deforesting the US in 1920. We have more forest here than we did 100 years ago.

Actual facts on the ground do not fit neatly into a one-liner, especially stable forests; this sentence is meant as a one-liner to win bar arguments. source: current graduate research papers in forestry

Could you maybe give us the 4-5 liner version then?

Re: Obsession with growth is destroying nature, 150 countries warn

#189

Post by pjmlp »

graemep wrote: post #177
pjmlp wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people at the layoffs side when growth doesn't meet the exponential quarter targets, or destroyed villages to build a few hotel chains that deplet water banks for their golf fields, haven't noticed it.

A real problem, but a different one. Bad decisions, bad government, bad distribution of resources. It does not alter the underlying trend which is better for the vast majority of people.

Only when that vast majority is synonymous with the upper class driving their Ferraris into work, or heli-taxis.

Re: Obsession with growth is destroying nature, 150 countries warn

#190

Post by t0bia_s »

lich_king wrote: post #140
fasterik wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a completely nostalgic, one-sided view of the urban vs. rural divide. It's also ignorant of the data on the impact of cities on nature. Cities have a lower carbon footprint per capita, lower land use per capita, people own fewer cars, use public transportation more often. If everyone lived in a city, nature would be better off. People live in cities because they are vibrant, they have culture, the arts, intel…

[flagged]

So what's the solution here? Do we forcibly sterilize people? Lock them up if they have children? What's the anti-growth strategy we're actually advocating for?

You don't need to. Fertility rate per woman in wealthy countries decreases every year.

Growth is natural, overconsumption is not.

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