If growth equals death, is the Earth doomed?

To the Times: Ask an economist to name the most important factor for a healthy economy and you’ll no doubt hear “it has to grow,” the underlying logic being that without growth our entire society would falter. How much growth makes an economist grin? Rates surpassing two percent are considered “acceptable” while rates below that are regarded as “anemic.” Three percent and higher, and our economy is “humming” or “booming.” But growth comes with consequences which are never mentioned by economists and certainly never detailed in any national news outlets. Earth is no less finite than a terrarium, so if we continue to grow, we will eventually exceed our planet’s carrying capacity and collide with the walls of our container.

As Jared Diamond points out in his book “Collapse,” the fate of many an ancient civilization provides instruction for what we can expect if we repeat their mistakes. Easter Island, among many other examples, had an organized society that collapsed due to unrelenting growth and resource consumption. And just as Easter Islanders were restricted to only the resources of their island, our civilization has only the space and resources Earth provides. Collapse is inevitable if we continue to grow.

That most of us don’t understand this has to do with what John Paulos labels “innumeracy,” a frailty which handicaps our thinking and prevents us from understanding large numbers, probability, and the exponential function. One concept in particular not understood is the “doubling time formula” which accurately predicts the amount time it takes something like a resource to be reduced by half or the quantity of something like population to double.

Using the “Rule of 70,” it’s possible to determine a doubling (or “halving” period) by dividing 70 by the growth rate. So a growth rate of seven percent has a doubling time of just ten years whereas one percent growth has an average doubling time of 70 years. Our current population of seven billion people growing at two percent would grow to 14 billion people in 35 years. At one percent, we’d get there in 70 years. In 140 years at a one percent growth rate, the population would reach 28 billion.

But what does it matter in terms of our long-term survival as a species if it takes a little longer for us to fill up our terrarium and consume all its resources? Whether it takes 300, 500, or 1,000 years, our civilization is still doomed. It’s not just about living space, either. As our population grows, natural resources will decline proportionately. Growth of one percent means that resources like open space, forests, fish populations, or any other finite resource we depend on will be halved in just 70 years.

Some far sighted thinkers like physics professor Albert Bartlett have warned us of the hazards of unrestrained growth. In his famous lecture entitled “Arithmetic, Population, and Energy,” (see Youtube) Bartlett tells the story of a bacteria colony in a bottle. Starting with just one single cell, the bacteria population doubles each night and, at the end of 30 days, the bottle is completely filled. Bartlett asks his students “when is the bottle half full?” Most say the bottle is half full after 15 days, but these students, like most of us, fail to understand the doubling time formula, i.e., the exponential function. The bottle is actually half full on the 29th day. Overnight, the population doubles and with no more room or resources, the bacteria population collapses. Even finding three more empty bottles only delays the collapse by just two days.

So Earth is that bottle and we are the bacteria. Our numbers have grown just as predictably. It took tens of thousands of years until 1804 to reach one billion people. By 1927 our numbers doubled to two billion. Four billion was reached less than 50 years later in 1974, and by 2025, our population will exceed eight billion.

Why not go to outer space and colonize other planets? Like the lesson of the bacteria in the bottle, this ignores the background growth rate but, more importantly, the expense of going to space. It takes more than 10 gallons of rocket fuel to lift a single pound of payload into orbit. It would take the world’s remaining energy supplies to relocate less than 1 percent of our population to another planet, assuming we found one and assuming there were any energy supplies left to use for that purpose. The only viable alternative is to protect what we have now and design a zero-growth, super-efficient, zero-waste economy powered by 100 percent renewable energy.

And don’t be fooled by the nonsense of “smart growth” you’ll hear some politicians tout. Growth is growth: Celebrating smart growth is like celebrating metastatic prostate cancer. How much more comforting is it for someone to hear they have a slowgrowing cancer instead of a fastgrowing one? The uncontrolled growth of cells dooms that person’s survival. So what’s “smart” about simply delaying the ultimate collapse of our civilization?

We have been given a cancer diagnosis. Yet this uncontrolled growth is actually curable if we decide to take our medicine and build a civilization that provides for everyone’s needs with zero growth. Or we can stay locked on the growth treadmill and face inevitable collapse– except this time, on a planetary scale. Leave your comments online Use hashtag at