LINK to Guardian article, "This is bigger than climate change. It is a battle to redefine humanity", by George Monbiot from the Copenhagen Climate Conference.
Even if we manage to prevent climate breakdown, [economic] growth means that it's only a matter of time before we hit a new constraint, which demands a new global response: oil, water, phosphate, soil. We will lurch from crisis to existential crisis unless we address the underlying cause: perpetual growth cannot be accommodated on a finite planet.
What George Monbiot says about economic growth is quite true, but he overlooks what is driving it. Yet, until we recognise and develop an understanding of this, we are powerless to do anything about it.
What's driving economic growth is man's Darwinian nature, which the existing socioeconomic order developed over centuries to simultaneously serve and exploit in a misplaced and perverted continuation of his primordial struggle for survival, advantage and "success" (largely reduced to the individual pursuit and exercise of POWER, i.e. money, social and professional status, the moral high ground, etc.) in the artificial environment of human civilisation itself.
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