Growth, Limits, and a Better World

Garrett Hardin discusses limits to growth, energy, and sustainability.

Is growth progress? Is growth wonderful and something that we should be striving for? Do you support such a position?

"No. I wouldn't be an ecologist if I did. The ecologist says basically that growth presents terrible problems, and we've had 400 years of a drunken brawl, you might say, in which we have turned more and more of the earth's wealth, accumulated over millions of years - oil, gas, things like that, into our usage, but we can only spend that material - that quantity of wealth - once. It turns out that atomic energy is no escape, and solar energy is definitely limited. So we have not gotten rid of all limits; we merely have pushed many of them back. We're getting closer and closer to the point where we can't go much farther."

"If we draw on these resources accumulated over millions of years too fast, then the crash, when it comes, is going to be fantastically painful."

"I have a sentimental interest in our children and our grandchildren; I would like them to live in a better world. That's what I am trying to do: shake people up so that our grandchildren will live in a better world."

Educational Communications program 1725 - segment 4, 1999.

Learn more about Garrett Hardin:
https://www.garretthardinsociety.org