Sublime

En 1960,

Because plastics take so long to degrade, all the carbon atoms that go into them are atoms that won’t go into the atmosphere and drive up the temperature—at least not for a very long time.

For John Fullerton, the banker who walked away from Wall Street, here lies the source of the problem. ‘We’ve reached the logical conclusion of this expansionist economic paradigm,’ he says. ‘Unless we can achieve magical decoupling we have an exponential function on a closed system planet … yet the finance system has no in-built plateau, it can’t

The calls for ‘de-growth’ (Assadourian, 2012), post-growth economics (Post Growth Institute, 2015), prosperity without growth (Jackson, 2011), and a ‘steady state economy’ (Daly, 2009) have become louder and have found a much wider audience in recent years.

we would be wise today to look to dramatic and rapid “demand contraction”—call it degrowth or simply an adaptive response to an overused planet—to shift toward a truly environmentally sustainable world that meets human needs.

The growth machine has pushed humans beyond the limits of our minds—but it is also pushing the planet beyond its ecological limits.