Some excerpts from David Korten’s YES Magazine article on “Why
The Economy Should Stop Growing - And
Just Grow Up”.
It is time to reframe
the debate to recognize that we have pushed growth in material consumption
beyond Earth’s environmental limits. We must now shift our economic priority
from growth to maturity—meeting the needs of all within the limits of what
Earth can provide.
Global GDP is
currently growing 3 to 4 percent annually. Contrary to the promises of
politicians and economists, this growth is not eliminating poverty and creating
a better life for all. It is instead creating increasingly grotesque and
unsustainable imbalances in our relationship to Earth and to each other.
Families are
collapsing, and suicide rates are increasing.
Humans now consume at
a rate 1.6 times what Earth can provide. Weather becomes more severe and
erratic, and critical environmental systems are in decline.
We cannot, […], look
to the economic institutions that created the imbalances to now create an
economy that meets the essential needs of all in balanced relationship to a
living Earth. Global financial markets value life only for its market price.
And the legal structures of global corporations centralize power and delink it
from the realities of people’s daily lives.
The step to maturity
depends on rebuilding caring, place-based communities and economies and
restoring to them the power that global corporations and financial markets have
usurped.
Living organisms have
learned to self-organize as bioregional communities that create and maintain
the conditions essential to a living Earth community. We humans must take the
step to maturity as we learn to live as responsible members of that community.
See the entire article here:
http://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/why-the-economy-should-stop-growing-and-just-grow-up-20160504
