Is economic growth compatible with environmental preservation?

Arguments for smaller, more manageable consumption often revolve around issues of limited economic growth. There is a direct correlation between the amount of goods/services we consume, the size of the economy, and stresses imposed upon the natural environment. If we limit our personal consumption to that which is necessary to sustain us, the environment will be able to withstand increasing population growth, as well as make better use of finite resources. Economic activity is destructive insofar as it ignores resource limitations.

Ecologists such as Paul Hawken have proposed the concept of “natural capital”, defined as the environmental limits to economic expansion. In doing so, he argues against the view that human ingenuity will limitlessly expand our resource base, and that marginal costs to the environment from economic production and its “externalities” can be overcome. While economics as a discipline acknowledges scarcity, it generally holds that growth can be sustained through technology, increases in our knowledge base, resource-base expansion, or ingenuity. Fundamental ethical questions such as how much consumption is too much? are generally minimized, given that increasing consumption is necessary for economic growth and “prosperity”, according to the model.

According to Mark Sagoff, the World Resources Institute (WRI) has dismissed the idea that shortages of nonrenewable resources will prove a limiting factor in global economic growth, arguing instead that development will be checked by technology trends that create substitute resources. Consequently, in the WRI’s estimation, consumption as an ethical concern is not a pressing environmental issue for the foreseeable future. Sagoff dismisses this “blind faith in technology” by likening it to “the man who fell from a ten story building, and when passing the second story on the way down, concluded ‘so far, so good, so why not continue?’”

It is the contention of the authors of this project that economic growth must take into account ecological costs that pollution and other “externalities” impose upon our ecosystem, and furthermore, that ethical concerns regarding the depletion of non-renewable resources can no longer be ignored or minimized. Finally, we assert that on an individual level, it is incumbent upon each of us to re-examine our consumptive patterns and question whether “more is better?” Economists should be ethically bound to include the optimal ecosystem carrying capacity when formulating the scale of growth models.

As the World Bank notes, economic growth must be consistent with environmental protection. Although ethical concerns do not fit easily into quantitative model formulations, we maintain that there must be an appreciation of the intrinsic value nature bestows, and a recognition that ethical principles, cultural beliefs, aesthetic judgments, and even religious ideals which attach value to limited consumption must be honored in a complete conception of economic activity. Immanuel Kant argued for intrinsic value, noting that nature has an inherent dignity aside from its market price, and the pleasure we take from nature has value beyond calculation. Sagoff illustrates the difference between intrinsic versus instrumental value by citing children. Children should be cherished for their own sake, being human, says Sagoff, but in many parts of the world they are instead considered valuable only as economic resources to be sold as prostitutes or owned as slaves or sent out into the fields or mines to earn wages. Likewise, nature has an intrinsic value often overshadowed by its immediate instrumental usage.

Consumption beyond our means as individuals or societies is ethically equivalent to recognizing only the market value of nature. When we begin to see clearly the link between overconsumption and environmental degradation, then the ethics of limited consumption become clear. In the words of San Francisco State University philosophy professor Jacob Needleman, “authentic morality is the child of understanding.”