Tim Harford (“The planet’s got 99 problems, but exponential growth isn’t one”, Spectrum, FT.com, January 13) may be right about economists’ understanding of mathematics.
But what he, and they, fail to grasp is the physics, chemistry and biology of a planet on which the Stockholm Resilience Centre calculates our species collectively has already grown beyond six of the nine planetary boundaries. Not just the climate emergency and ecosystem collapse, but also “novel entities” (plastics, pesticides, pharmaceuticals and other disruptive substances), biogeochemical flows (particularly of nitrogen and phosphorous) and freshwater and land-system damage.
It is not a case that these can cope with growing slower; our impacts have to massively reduce.
Meanwhile, more than 700mn people regularly go hungry, and a similar number are without access to electricity. They too have the right to a healthy life with basics others take for granted.
Even in wealthy nations — from the US, where more than 12 per cent of people rely on food stamps, to the UK, where the quality of public health is visibly collapsing — the current system is working for the few, not the many.
A growth-dependent system, built on profit maximisation in markets dominated by oligarchic companies imposing massive externalised costs on us all, has got us here.
That system cannot continue; we must build a new one, rather than collapse into chaos.
If you knock down a wall with a sledge hammer, that is not the tool you use to rebuild it.
Natalie Bennett
House of Lords, London SW1, UK
