The insistence by some biologists that we must halt economic growth in order to save the environment has bothered me for some time, but I was prompted to write about it now because yet another, albeit minor, group has adopted a policy statement on the issue. That a naturalist group has agreed to this nonsense is not a big deal, but the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy (CASSE) continually pressures major scientific organizations like the Ecological Society of America to adopt similar policy positions. Although major scientific societies like ESA have not yet adopted a policy position on economic growth, in my personal experience, such views are widely held in the biological community. Anyway, let me briefly address two major flaws with CASSE et al.’s arguments: 1) their downright shoddy use of empirical data; and 2) the illogic of their policy prescriptions. First, a small qualification. I agree with CASSE inasmuch as economic growth (measured as GDP) should not be a policy end unto itself in developed countries, but as I will show, it does not follow that reducing GDP will help preserve the natural world.
Anti-growthers claim that economic growth inexorably leads to environmental decline, but their standard of evidence for this purported causative link is abysmally low. Two examples should suffice. A brief letter to Science magazine proposed using GDP as an indicator of environmental decline. Their reasoning? The tight correlation between GDP and the number of threatened or endangered species (see below). Well, duh! The Endangered Species Act began in 1972 with zero species listed and, given the fact that recovery, if successful, takes decades, it must have increased with time. GDP likewise is well known to have increased since it has been measured, in large part due to population growth. Besides, why use GDP as an indicator of environmental decline because it correlates well when perfectly good measures like, oh, I don’t know, number of threatened or endangered species already exist and have a 100% correlation with a measure of environmental decline!?!
Another approach taken by anti-growthers to establish a causative link between GDP growth and environmental decline is to look at cross-sectional data. A study often cited by anti-growthers did just that in 2001. They find that for 3 out of 5 taxonomic groups, the number of threatened or endangered species rises with per capita GDP. Already this is not a strong trend. The bigger problem is that they have not controlled for some very obvious confounding factors. First, economically developed countries have had higher population densities for longer and did much of their growth when environmental regulations were virtually nonexistent. There is no a priori reason that contemporary economies cannot continue develop with more sound environmental policies. Secondly, rich countries can afford to list many more endangered and threatened species because they have long had a dedicated staff of professional scientists whose job it is to do just that. The authors even admit that their result could be an artifact, but (wrongly, in my opinion) do not seem to think it matters.
Even if there were an unassailable link between historic GDP growth and environmental degradation, it would not follow that reducing economic growth is a desirable policy to protect the environment. CASSE et al. claim that economic growth (GDP) occurs at the expense of the environment. However, GDP is merely an aggregate measure of everything people purchase and has no necessary relationship to anything. For example, much technological innovation (e.g. energy efficient light bulbs) allows us to consume as much while using less resources, which is probably why GDP growth has generally become less natural resource intensive over time. Another problem is that there exist endless policies that would assuredly reduce GDP and have no positive impact on the environment. To give an absurd example, if the government paid everyone to stop working and chop down forests, GDP would surely decrease because no one would be performing productive labor, and the environment would be much worse off. The new Farm Bill is a real life example of both poor economics and poor environmentalism. Just as CASSE point out that GDP has no necessary relationship with real welfare or societal progress, it likewise has no necessary relationship with environmental stewardship.
The argument to stop growth as environmental policy is largely unsupported, politically illogical as it is naive, and arguably a distraction from more effective environmental policies. Scientific societies should focus their policy positions on more direct means of biological conservation that are supported by their professional activities, rather than on indirect indicators like GDP on which biologists have no special expertise. Ultimately, the sensible policy is simply to find the most efficient means of protecting the environment and let GDP fall where it may – it could go down, but it might go up. A focus on GDP per se utterly misses the point.