We can see this playing out in the statistics on raw material consumption. This metric tallies up the total weight of all the stuff humans extract and consume each year, including biomass, metals, minerals, fossil fuels and construction materials. These figures tell an astonishing story. They show a steady rise of material use in the first half of the 1900s, doubling from 7 billion tons per year to 14 billion tons per year. But then, in the decades after 1945, something truly bewildering happens. As GDP growth becomes entrenched as a core political objective around the world, and as economic
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Overindulgence in service of the growth imperitive.
