Efforts to curb unbridled growth that's killing the planet

Carolyn Lochhead


Fresh-faced tech millionaires snap up glitzy new condos in San Francisco. Across America, construction is up and unemployment is down. Consumers are buying. The economy is growing.

Yet instead of applause, voices from across the political spectrum - Berkeley activists and Beltway conservatives, Pope Francis and even some corporate CEOs - offer a critique of economic growth and its harm to the well-being of humans and the planet.

Ecologists warn that economic growth is strangling the natural systems on which life depends, creating not just wealth, but filth on a planetary scale. Carbon pollution is changing the climate. Water shortages, deforestation, tens of millions of acres of land too polluted to plant, and other global environmental ills are increasingly viewed as strategic risks by governments and corporations around the world.

"The physical pressure that human activities put on the environment can't possibly be sustained," said Stanford University ecologist Gretchen Daily, who is at the forefront of efforts across the world to incorporate "natural capital," the value of such things as water, topsoil and genetic diversity that nature provides, into economic decision making.

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http://www.sfgate.com/science/article/Efforts-to-curb-unbridled-growth-that-s-killing-5114760.php