Growing ... Growing ... Gone

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by Lester R. Brown

We risk a global crisis if we continue to define economic growth as progress,' without regard for environmental realities.

Lester R. Brown has helped pioneer the idea of building of an environmentally sustainable economy. In 1974, he founded the Worldwatch Institute, a research organization focused on analyzing worldwide environmental issues. Ten years later, he launched the "State of the World" reports, annual assessments that have become primary references for the global environmental movement.

Now, in this first of a three-part series from his new book, Plan B: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble, Brown explains why he believes we must act quickly to reorder global priorities. — MOTHER

Time is running out. Historically, we lived off the interest generated by the Earth's natural capital assets, but we are now consuming those assets. We have built an environmental "bubble" economy, one in which economic output is artificially inflated by overconsumption of the Earth's natural assets. The challenge today is to deflate the bubble before it bursts.

As world population has doubled and as the global economy has expanded sevenfold over the last 50 years, our claims on the Earth have become excessive.

We are cutting trees faster than they can regenerate, overgrazing rangelands and converting them into deserts, over-cutting aquifers, and draining rivers dry. On our cropland, soil erosion exceeds new soil formation, slowly depriving the soil of its inherent fertility. We are taking fish from the ocean faster than they can reproduce.

We are releasing carbon dioxide (CO,) into the atmosphere faster than nature can absorb it, creating the greenhouse effect. As atmospheric CO 2 levels rise, so does the Earth's temperature.

Habitat destruction and climate change are destroying plant and animal species far faster than new species can evolve, launching the first mass extinction since the one that eradicated dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Throughout history, humans have lived on the Earth's sustainable yield the interest from its natural endowment. But now we are consuming the endowment itself. In ecology, as in economics, we can consume principal along with interest in the short run, but in the long run this consumption leads to bankruptcy.

A team of scientists recently concluded that humanity's collective demands first surpassed the Earth's regenerative capacity in 1980. This study, published by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, estimated our demands in 1999 exceeded that capacity by 20 percent.

Bubble economies are not new. U.S. investors got an up-close view of this phenomenon when the bubble of high-tech stocks burst in 2000 and the NASDAQ, an indicator of the value of these stocks, declined by some 75 percent.