A doubling of the world's population, something likely in fewer than fifty years, the authors say, means that the human economy will be using eighty percent, and shortly thereafter one hundred percent, of the breath of life. In this scenario, the inner circle of the economy bulges against the outer circle of the ecosystem, which cannot grow to accommodate it. Such total dominion over nature may disrupt the infinitesimal web of life. It may take an environmental disaster to shake our faith in a paradigm on which we have staked everything and to persuade the poor countries to get serious about population control. But the social and political implications of shifting paradigms from growth to sustainability are frightening.
Growth is the world's only current answer to global mass poverty.
Absent growth, redistribution of the goods of progress from the North to the South would have to become the answer to endemic poverty. But any such redistribution, in the wake of the modest but controversial environmental standards agreed to at the environmental summit at Kyoto, is unrealistic. An Introduction to Ecological Economics ends with a section on green policy initiatives. A switch from reliance on policing the environment through regulation to an incentive-based system. The top concern of those surveyed was severe air and water pollution, with the next four problems on the list also having to do with the environment.