Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The twentieth century saw unprecedented environmental change, much of it the cumulative and unintended result of human economic activity. In the judgment of many, this change - involving the exhaustion of natural resources and sinks, extensive pollution, and unprecedented impacts upon climate, life-forms, and life-sustaining systems - is undermining the conditions necessary for the economic activity to continue. In a word, present patterns of economic activity are judged to be “unsustainable.”An initial response was to suggest that human society would have to abandon the attempt to improve the human condition through economic growth, and settle instead for zero growth. The response was naturally unwelcome, both to political leaders anxious to assure voters of better times to come, and to businesses anxious to stay in business. Its logic, moreover, is open to question. For even if we accept that economic growth has been the chief cause of environmental degradation, it does not follow that abandoning growth is the remedy. If zero growth led to global war, for example, there would be environmental degradation, and zero growth to boot. And genetic technology holds out the hope, at least, that we might provide for human needs with decreasing impact on the natural environment, and even reverse some of the degradation that has already occurred.This is the hope expressed by the idea of ... log in or subscribe to read full text