GROWTH CAN BE Green

50 YEARS AGO IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN reasonable to fear that because of our bottomless desire for growth, we humans were going to strip our planet bare and poison it with pollution. But not anymore. The past half-century has shown us that we can increase human population and prosperity while also taking better care of the planet we all live on. We still face real challenges now and in the years ahead, of which global warming is the most pressing. The good news is that we now know the playbook for effectively meeting these challenges. The bad news is that we’re not doing a great job of following that playbook at present. We have to do better. We have to get smarter about meeting the problems we face.

In 1970, people took to the streets on the first Earth Day because of how we were treating our world. It’s easy to see why they were so concerned. The 20th century, and in particular the post-war decades, witnessed by far the fastest growth in human history. Around the world, populations grew more quickly than ever before, and economies grew even faster as people strove for a higher standard of living. Unfortunately, it seemed that along with this growth came three side effects, all of which were both inevitable and terrible.

First, we were using up the earth’s natural resources at an ever-faster clip. In the U.S., for example, consumption of aluminum, fertilizer and other important materials was growing even more quickly than the overall economy was in the years leading up to Earth Day. On a finite planet, this was a scary trend. If it continued, disaster seemed unavoidable. At MIT, a team led by biophysicist Donella Meadows built a computer simulation of the global economy and used it to run scenarios about how the future would unfold. Their conclusions, published in the, were stark: “We can thus say with some confidence that, under the assumption of no major change in the present system, population and industrial growth will certainly stop within the [twenty-first] century, at the latest. The system…collapses because of a resource crisis.”