Eye Opener: Review of Reading 36: Economic Growth and the Environment Alternatives to the Limits Paradigm

In the reading, Economic Growth and the Environment: Alternatives to the Limits Paradigm, the topic of what to do when we run out of resources is discussed. This article talks about limits, and what to do when we reach them. The idea of this reading is that there are biological and physical limits to economic growth beyond which both ecological and economic collapse would occur. Right now, humans are causing environmental degradation at a pace like never before. Because of this, we must find other ways to adapt our lifestyles.


Alternative Metaphors for Environmental Destruction


In this section the author, Carlos Davidson, gives many metaphors as to what our ecological limits to economic growth can best be seen as. First he gives the example of a plane analogous to the Earth. Pulling a rivet from the planes wing is like an act of environmental destruction. A plan has a lot of rivets, so at first pulling them has little or no affect, but after awhile, it takes its tole and the plane will crash. Another example Davidson gave was like a car speeding toward a cliff. If the car doesn't stop, it will go over the cliff.

Actual Environmental Destruction: Limit or Continuum's?

There are five types of limits possible: input limits, limits on waste assimilation, entropy/thermodynamic limits, limits on human use of the products of photosynthesis, and limits attributable to the loss of biodiversity. Input limits receive the most attention. The message of this is that limited natural resources must limit human population and economic activity. One thing that I found interesting in this section was that predictions of economic limits generally fail be cause they are based on the assumption that limits can be calculated according to current resource use and current resource stocks. Waste absorption was another topic it discussed. It stated that only so much of a pollutant can be released into the environment before the environment will no longer absorb the waste. However, the fact that pollution is causing environmental degradation does not mean that there are limits. The article then talks about entropy, and shows how flexibility of production and how we dont want to tie limits to the use of any specific resources for which there may be alternatives. Biodiversity limits talks about the limits on our species and economy.

The Politics of Limits


This section of the article discusses the different sides that different people take. It's known that we need to turn this problem around, and fast, but first we have to get everyone on board. I found it interesting that this part talked about how for so long we've been saying this will happen, it is kind of like the boy who called wolf. Everyone's been waiting for this huge catastrophe to happen, and nothing has happened yet, so now that we're closer to things happening, no one wants to believe it.

An Alternative Approach

In an alternative approach to limits, we would examine economic structures, social relationships of power and ownership, control of state institutions, and culture. There are many equally important factors when thinking about our growth, and unless all aspects are looked at, we are not going to get the appropriate and correct approaches figured out.

My Thoughts

At first while reading this, I was kind of mad at the author. I felt like he was challenging everything that anyone has ever said about environmental degradation. However, after continuing to read I realize now that the author actually had some really great points. This is a line from the book that really made me think, "Similarly, in The Population Bomb, Ehrlich predicted that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the 1970s from absolute food shortage." Hearing this, it made me actually ponder for a moment how much we could be wrong about thinking that we're going to run out of resources, like tomorrow. I definitely think that we need to be conserving our resources and continue looking for renewable resources. I also still think that this is a pressing issue, and one that needs to be dealth with, but it just makes you think.


Terms

environmental degradation: the deterioration of the environment through depletion of resources such as air, water, and soil.

entropy: the measure of a disorder of a system.

limits: said to describe the behavior of a function as its argument or input either "gets close" to some point, or as the argument becomes arbitrarily large

metaphor: is language that directly compares seemingly unrelated subjects

continuum: a continuous extent, succession, or whole, no part of which can be distinguished from neighboring parts except by arbitrary division.


Additional Resources

The Population Bomb: This is a book that was written that discusses more about the population and resources.

Opposing Views

Here is an opposing view of my article. It's about how they think the Population Bomb is going to happen. Click Here

Discussion Question

What do you think? Are we going to "cry wolf" to many times, and end up being in trouble when we really need help the most?