Introduction: My Predicament

What Future? Scarcity of Resources or a Society of Plenty

Whether economic growth can be sustained in a finite natural world is one of the earliest and most enduring questions in economic literature. In a world where 25 million tourists (Yeoman, 2008) took an international holiday in 1950 and 100 years later it is forecasted to grow to 4.7 billion. Is such a forecast sustainable? As Krautkraemer (2005) points out, the past two centuries have seen unprecedented growth in human population and economic wellbeing for a good portion of the world. This growth has been fed by equally unprecedented natural resource consumption and environmental impacts, including conversion of large portions of the natural world to human use, prompting recurring concern about whether the world's natural resource base is capable of sustaining such growth. To some degree, this concern is supported by simple mathematics: exponential physical growth in a finite world eventually generates absurd results. For example, any positive population growth rate eventually has the population completely covering the face of the Earth and expanding rapidly into space; any positive growth rate for petroleum consumption eventually results in annual production that is greater than the mass of the Earth.