here i paste a document from my files i've been working on to send to the local electronic fishwrap;

Entitlement; Its curious how many seemingly sane people believe you can have infinite economic growth on a finite planet? Perpetual economic growth and its cousin, limitless technological expansion, are expectations so deeply held by so many in this culture that they often go entirely unquestioned. These beliefs are somehow seen as the ultimate definition of what it is to be human: perpetual economic growth and limitless technological expansion are what we do.

Some who believe in perpetual growth have said things like; “We have in our libraries the technology to feed, clothe, and supply energy to an ever-growing population for the next 7 billion years.” When it comes to American economic policies, insanity is easy to find, as are more wackos who’ve said, “There are no limits to the carrying capacity of the earth that are likely to bind at any time in the foreseeable future. The idea that we should put limits on growth because of some natural limit is a profound error.”

Others might acknowledge that physical limits might possibly exist, but they also believe that if you just slap the word sustainable in front of the phrase “economic growth,” then you can still somehow have continued growth on a finite planet, perhaps through so-called “soft” or “service” or “high-tech” economies, or through nifty “green” innovations, ignoring the facts that people still need to eat, that humans have overshot carrying capacity and are systematically destroying the natural world, and that even something as groovy as an iPod requires mining, industrial, and energy infrastructures, all of which are functionally unsustainable.

There are a lot of people who don’t think about it: they simply absorb the outlook of the newscasters who say, “Economic growth, good; economic stagnation, bad.” If you care more about the economic system than life on the planet, this is true. If you care more about life than the economic system, it’s not quite so true, because this economic system must constantly increase production to grow, and what, after all, is production? It is the conversion of the living to the dead, the conversion of living forests into two-by-fours, living rivers into stagnant pools for generating hydroelectricity, living fish into fish sticks, and ultimately all of these into money. What is gross national product? It’s a measure of this conversion of the living to the dead. The more quickly the living world is converted into dead products, the higher the GNP. These simple equations are complicated by the fact that when GNP goes down, people often lose jobs so the world is getting killed.

Once people have enslaved themselves to a growth economy, they’ve pretty much committed themselves to a perpetual war economy, because in order to maintain this growth, they will have to continue to colonize an ever-wider swath of the planet and exploit its inhabitants. In the short run, there’s good news for those committed to a growth economy which is that by converting your resources into weapons you gain a short-term competitive advantage over those peoples who live sustainably, and you can steal their land and overuse it to fuel your perpetual-growth economy.

As for those whose land you’ve stolen, well, you can either massacre these newly conquered, enslave them, or assimilate them into your growth economy. Usually it’s some combination of all three. The massacre of the bison, to present just one example, was necessary to destroy the Plains Indians’ traditional way of life and force them to at least somewhat assimilate. The bad news for those committed to a growth economy is that it’s essentially a dead-end street: once you’ve overshot your home’s carrying capacity, you have only two choices: keep living beyond the means of the planet until your culture collapses; or choose to give up the benefits you gained from the conquest in order to save your culture. Easter Island provides some idea of how that goes.

A perpetual-growth economy is insane and impossible. Of course humans are a special species to whom a wise and omnipotent God has granted the exclusive rights and privileges of dominion over this planet that is here for us to use. Growth economies are unchecked and will push past any boundaries set up by anyone other than the perpetrators: certainly the fact that indigenous cultures already are living on this or that piece of ground has never stopped those in power from expanding their economy; nor is the death of the oceans stopping their exploitation; nor is the grinding poverty of the dispossessed.

How do we stop those who carry out a perpetual-growth economy? Seeing oiled pelicans and burned sea turtles won’t move them to stop. Nor will hundred-degree days in Moscow. We can’t stop them by making them feel guilty. We can’t stop them by appealing to them to do the right thing. The only way to stop them is to make it so they have no other choice and they are giving us none.