Growth is Our God

I am happy when I make more money this year than last, when I have plans to build onto my house, when I buy a new car, when I travel more than before, when I consume more resources than ever.

Towns, cities, counties, and countries watch their annual growth rate (population, GDP, etc.) and read happiness or gloom into the signs much as the ancients would tear open a bird and read the contents of its stomach.

Colleges seek to increase enrollments and endowments. Businesses seek to increase profits and their share of the market. Workers always want a raise. Investors want growth in their portfolios.

Happiness is consuming more this year than we did last year -- more farmland paved over for housing developments, more water diverted from rivers, more coal burned, more fiber optic connections, more cell phone users, more computer memory, more horsepower, and so on, and so on.

All plants and animals strive for more in the competition for resources. But in nature, growth is checked by disease, predators, parasites, and famine. Humans have temporarily removed these obstacles through modern medicine, modern industrialized agriculture, and systematically killing all large predators. The only consistent check on human population growth today is the occasionally successful disease and warfare. But for two hundred years, despite world wars and pandemics, human growth has been unnaturally successful -- and despite our mistaking this for a permanent condition, nature will eventually check our hubris.

Now I am happy -- another posting!