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What Happens When the Economy Eats the Planet?

Over the past couple of years, the global economy has been in rough shape, no doubt. But as we start to pull ourselves out of this slump, have have to ask ourselves: is it a good thing to resume growing?

This is something I’ve been worried about for a while, but not being particularly savvy about economics, my fret was relegated to simply wondering "wait, how is it that every aspect of a healthy economy is predicated on infinite growth? We live on a finite planet, with finite resources. Should we really expect to be able to grow forever?"

Luckily Andrew Simms over at the Guardian is much more eloquent than I about expressing such fears. In a recent column http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2010/jan/25/uk-growth-energy-resources-boundaries , he laid out several reasons why we shouldn’t cheer on economic growth for it’s own sake. Not least of those is a quote from Jared Diamond’s book Collapse, in which the author states that when it comes to our ability to harvest more and more wealth from our oceans, farmland, and forest, "an impressive-looking bank account may conceal a negative cashflow."

By Michael Reilly

Full Story: http://news.discovery.com/earth/what-happens-when-the-economy-eats-the-planet.html

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