Environmental thinkers have warned that infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible now for more than half a century.
Since the publication of The Limits to Growth in 1972, the evidence has only become more confronting.
Climate destabilisation, biodiversity loss, soil degradation, freshwater depletion, ocean acidification, and resource exhaustion all suggest that industrial civilisation has entered a condition of ecological overshoot.
Sufficiency
In my latest essay, 'Sacred Revolt: Why Reverence Before Restraint Transforms the Limits-to-Growth Predicament', I argue that this predicament cannot be understood adequately as a merely technical or economic problem.
It is also, and perhaps more fundamentally, a spiritual and existential crisis rooted in the desacralisation of the modern world.
The usual ecological conclusion is that humanity must restrain itself. We must consume less, produce less, travel less, extract less, emit less, and perhaps even desire less.
