Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World. Tony Juniper

a desire for happiness by having, and an assurance that this desire will never be completely satisfied.

      Professor Tim Jackson of the University of Surrey has called the challenge we face the ‘dilemma of growth’ and recently put his name to an open letter to Her Majesty the Queen that described the underlying cause of the recent economic meltdown as ‘a multi-generational debt–binge, inextricably linked to a concomitant multi-generational energy–binge’. He is not the only one to point out that bingeing does not lead to happiness. The Nuffield Centre in the UK has been conducting ground-breaking research on adolescence with a meticulous ‘time-trend’ study that began in 1974 and now spans three decades. It reports that the country’s young people now have ‘significantly higher levels of emotional and behavioural problems than 16-year-olds who lived through the 1970s and ‘80s’. Clearly, as we continue to liquidate the world’s natural assets in pursuit of what we call ‘progress’, the many social challenges that we hoped economic growth would solve – poverty, stress and ill health – for example seem reluctant to respond to the cure of yet more consumption.

      Mahatma Gandhi made a crucial observation when he said that humanity has a natural tendency to consume. The crucial element that he felt was missing from much of the Western approach to life was that of limit. If there are no limits on that tendency, he explained, we can become obsessed with satisfying our desires, consuming ever more as we chase what little satisfaction we achieve. Gandhi was also very clear about the danger of this tendency if it is legitimized by a view of the world that puts humanity at the centre of things, operating under the assumption of an absolute right over Nature. He predicted that such a combination would prove explosive. It would be, he declared, a very destructive world view indeed.

      I think the evidence suggests that Gandhi was right, and not just from an ecological point of view. Many developed countries have reported long-term increases in mental health problems. The combination of the stress of trying to keep pace with rampant consumerism and the impact of people living more isolated lives has led to many millions becoming victims rather than the beneficiaries of how we have chosen to achieve and measure progress. Our physical health has also suffered. Many millions of people are now classified as clinically obese because of their much more sedentary lifestyles and their fatridden diets. It is a depressing portrait of our age that we recently reached the point where the number of obese people in the world surpassed the 800 million who are estimated to be malnourished. This is but one awful example of how we are now living in a world of widening extremes. Carrying on as we are, ignoring the need for balance and a more integrative form of economics, is only going to force that gap to grow wider.

       As we continue to liquidate the world’s natural

       assets in pursuit of what we call ‘progress’, the

       many social challenges that we hoped economic

       growth would solve – poverty, stress and ill health

       for example seem reluctant to respond to the cure.

      I am only too aware of the argument from developing countries that they should not be denied the benefits that the developed world has enjoyed, albeit to such an overblown degree, but we must all recognize what will happen if we do not think again and think constructively about how to build a better economic system for the future, one that understands the limitations and dangers inherent in our present industrial mindset. We have to find ways of ending poverty, but we also need to look at the way societies have developed in the richer parts of the world. We need to question the unbridled encouragement of consumerism and, I am afraid to say, we also have to address that issue that so often is side-stepped as being just too hot to handle, the question of population increase. Not only because of what will happen to the very lifesupport systems of our planet if we do not do so, but also the consequences this will have on the welfare of people. As the biologist Paul Ehrlich has pointed out, ‘there is no technological fix that will allow perpetual population and economic growth.’ At some point we will need to recognize that there are very important limits to what Nature can withstand, and that these limits must determine what we can demand of the stressed systems we rely upon. I am absolutely sure that this question of population growth has to be part of the debate about developing a different philosophy for living.

      LEFT: Aerial view of crowded favela housing contrasts with modern apartment buildings in São Paulo, Brazil. Scenes like this remind us that rapid economic growth does not automatically solve pressing social challenges. Despite decades of growth many countries remain socially divided at the same time as environmental damage has accelerated.

      After all, the simple fact that I have tried to demonstrate so far is that pursuing ever more conventional economic development, based on growing the economy by promoting more consumption of goods and services, and doing so for billions more people in the next forty years, will place an impossible strain on the finite resources and inherent capacity of the Earth to renew and replenish herself. The simple arithmetic says that we cannot expect to succeed.

      If, as some economists have done, we consider the services we derive from Nature as if they amounted to an annual income, then, as an example, in 2008 we had used up our entire yearly budget by mid-September. That was a few days earlier than the one in 2007. In both cases, from then until New Year’s Day we were living by liquidating our capital assets: the forests, soil, fresh water, fisheries and biodiversity. So we are already operating on a diminished return, and that is with 6.8 billion people. If the world’s population continues to balloon as every prediction says it will, and if economic development continues at the pace we are forcing it to, then this ‘credit overdraft’ is set to get a lot bigger and its effects a lot worse. By mid-century the idea of making it to September will be a pipedream. We will have used up the Earth’s depleted services by April and by then the degradation of our capital assets will have put Nature close to going bust.