Starting Positions

This list represents Post Growth Institute’s “Starting Positions,” the facts and opinions that are the basis for our organization.

1. Economies cannot keep growing indefinitely

Economies exist within the physical environment. Their existence relies upon the consumption of natural resources like fuel, forests and agricultural land. These natural resources are either non-renewable and therefore limited in total stock, or are produced at a rate that is limited by the environment’s ability to regenerate them. If economies keep growing in the form they are now, natural resources will be consumed at a rate that is greater than their rate of production, or environmental side effects will undermine the environment’s ability to sustain us. We can, and must, keep our economies within the limits imposed by our physical environment.

2. The human population cannot keep growing indefinitely

Our total demand on our physical environment is how much we each consume, multiplied by the total number of us. Every additional human on Earth must consume natural resources to both survive and prosper. If we want to survive into the future, our total consumption of natural resources must be less than what is produced. Like a household budget, we must spend less than what we earn. Every additional human makes it harder for us to keep doing this. We cannot grow the human population indefinitely, with larger numbers of people all wanting a bigger share of our physical environment’s limited resources.

3. Advances in technology do not mean we can keep growing indefinitely

Technology cannot create something from nothing. For example, technology can’t change the fact that there is a limited amount of oil. It can only squeeze a little more use from our current known stocks. In a world with increasing population and consumption rates, increases in technological efficiency only buy us a little more time before such gains are cancelled out by further growth. Improvements in technological efficiency have historically been unable to keep up with the rate of growth. Perpetual growth means that more people consume more, regardless of how efficiently we use resources. Rather than relying on technology alone, we must challenge the obsession with infinite growth on a finite planet.

4. To live sustainably requires equitable convergence to a sustainable footprint.

Human impact on the planet is now at such a scale that the rate at which we are directly using or indirectly affecting some natural resources is faster than the rate at which they can be replenished. That is, we are in ‘overshoot’. This means we are putting those systems that support us at serious risk, and we must actually decrease, not merely stabilise, our total consumption of which both population and per person consumption rates are a part. We must do so in ways that are equitable for all human beings and other species.