All societies confront a mounting dilemma: how to continue economic growth or some other way of improving the quality of life, and yet minimize or reverse its negative effects on an already severely deteriorating environment. We depend on and aspire to the benefits of economic growth. And yet in pursuit of growth, we extract and exhaust resources and damage our natural environment. This damage extends to other species, and eventually to humans, as well as to the integrity of the global ecological system as a whole. Many natural scientific studies indicate that increasing environmental degradation is an objective fact; no amount of human denial can make it go away. This situation presents humanity with the Growth/Environment (GE) dilemma: If we grow jobs and profits, it seems, we further destroy the environment. But if we protect the environment, we slow down the economic growth that makes increasing profits and jobs possible, thereby threatening both. A middle way between these two extremes may exist, but it is proving hard to find.

The GE dilemma plagues most societies - highly industrialized or just developing. We are all caught on the horns of this dilemma, as time will make increasingly apparent. How can we resolve it? How can we garner the benefits of growth without paying its environmental costs? Technological optimists think new technology will fix it for us. But if not, we need to find some way to fine tune our global societal productive and eliminative systems to fit within the limits of “Spaceship Earth, ” while still providing for the crew members.