Collision Course ─ Endless Growth on a Finite Planet

The notion of ever-expanding economic growth has been promoted so relentlessly that"growth" is now entrenched as the natural objective of collective human effort. The publichas been convinced that growth is the natural solution to virtually all social problems -- poverty,debt, unemployment, and even the environmental degradation caused by the determined pursuit ofgrowth. Meanwhile, warnings by scientists that we live on a finite planet that cannot sustaininfinite economic expansion are ignored or even scorned. In Collision Course,Kerryn Higgs examines how society's commitment to growth has marginalized scientific findings on thelimits of growth, casting them as bogus predictions of imminent doom.

Higgs tellshow in 1972, The Limits to Growth -- written by MIT researchers Donella Meadows,Dennis Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and William Behrens III -- found that unimpeded economic growth waslikely to collide with the realities of a finite planet within a century. Although the book'sarguments received positive responses initially, before long the dominant narrative of growth aspanacea took over. Higgs explores the resistance to ideas about limits, tracing the propagandizingof "free enterprise," the elevation of growth as the central objective of policy makers,the celebration of "the magic of the market," and the ever-widening influence ofcorporate-funded think tanks--a parallel academic universe dedicated to the dissemination ofneoliberal principles and to the denial of health and environmental dangers from the effects oftobacco to global warming. More than forty years after The Limits to Growth, theidea that growth is essential continues to hold sway, despite the mounting evidence of its costs --climate destabilization, pollution, intensification of gross global inequalities, and depletion ofthe resources on which the modern economic edifice depends.

Kerryn Higgs is an Australian writer. She received her PhD in Geography and Environmental Studies from the University of Tasmania.