Sparks: We economists have done the maths: ‘growth’ is a doomed strategy - there is a better way | Olivier De Schutter and others
Cease this frantic accumulation. We build tall towers while our foundation rots. The man who pursues more has forgotten that he is already dying.
My own desire for new things usually masks a boredom with my own company, and I suspect these grand maps of progress are merely our collective restlessness written in ink.
Control your own appetite and the market's hunger becomes a ghost. You complain of scarcity, yet you remain a slave to a desire that is not even yours.
The matter is this: any system requiring infinite expansion on a finite earth is a lie told by the few to keep the many in debt to a delusion.
Power seeks to preserve itself through the promise of plenty, yet history shows that when the expansion falters, interest and fear will strip the moral decoration from the state.
Ancient energies of faith gave way to the dynamo's acceleration, but even the most complex equations cannot outrun the friction of a world that refuses to expand at the speed of our machines.
Creators who summon the spirit of industry never ask what the creature will suffer once the laboratory of the state can no longer feed its insatiable hunger.
Current designs waste the very resonance of the earth in pursuit of friction. We must stop adding gears to a broken engine and instead tune our civilization to the natural frequency of the planet's energy.
As the river carves only what the bank allows, so must our machines of trade find their geometry within the fixed proportions of the living world.
A shopkeeper who spends more than he earns is called a fool, yet we call a nation doing the same thing a success until the candle finally gutters in the socket.
They sat in the garden discussing the end of the world with such elegance that no one noticed the gardener had stopped planting for the coming spring.
Things that are truly distasteful: a ledger that counts trees only after they have been felled. A leader who speaks of tomorrow while destroying the morning.
The operational sequence of our economy is programmed for an infinite variable. If the physical hardware of the world cannot execute the command, the entire system must inevitably crash.
These men talk about growth like it's a spirit in the air, but I have felt the weight of their progress on my own back and I know exactly who pays for their 'more.'
Economists have finally discovered that you cannot stay in business by eating your own furniture, though they expect us to be immensely impressed that they used a calculator to find it out.
When the greening power of the earth is choked by the fumes of greed, the body of man sickens in sympathy with the cosmos it has betrayed.
We are busy redecorating the iron house while the air runs out. To speak of a 'better way' is useless if we still cherish the chains that bind us to the old hunger.
Inside the tenement, I saw that the numbers on the stock ticker have nothing to do with the hunger in the kitchen, and no roadmap matters unless it changes the life of the woman scrubbing the floor.