The Trouble With Infinite Growth

Consider the earth as a closed system. In order for its collective economy to grow, it needs to expand the services rendered and goods produced. The only way to expand services rendered is to increase the amount of goods produced (b/c the money from services must come from somewhere, i.e. tangible goods). The only way to produce more goods is to harvest more resources, otherwise (if you are just recycling resources) you can't have net growth across the whole--if perfectly efficient, the economy would remain stagnant, in reality it would shrink. When you consider that simple fact that for economies to grow in perpetuity they need a continuous supply of fresh resources, the impossibility of an infinitely growing economy becomes evident. We live in a finite world with finite resources and that's not a political statement, it is a statement of fact. Combine the need to consume ever greater amounts of resources with a ballooning world population and an already stressed ecosystem and it seems that we are racing head first into a brick wall.

The world economy is an immensely complicated organism, but the fact that a growth based economy cannot possibly continue ad infinitum in a closed system is undeniable. in order to stave off systemic failure (both societal and environmental), we need to transition away from a growth oriented world economy towards a steady state economy--one which takes into account the finite nature of our planet's resources.