Comment: Growth trumps everything was the message from Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s recent state of the nation address. His declaration came on the heels of similar announcements calling for growth at all costs from the new president of the US and from many other world leaders.

As usual, news media outlets in New Zealand immediately sought comment and analysis on Luxon’s growth plans from economists. Media outlets soliciting the views of economists is par for the course, but almost never does anyone consider consulting ecologists. This is inexplicable when you consider the reality that the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment.

I am an ecologist and if I had been asked this would be my response.

I could find nowhere in Luxon’s plans or the coverage of them, a single mention of the threats of growth on the environment. This is bizarre when you consider growth is the very thing that has compromised the life-supporting capacity of the planet to the point where it is now teetering on the verge of collapse. The crucial need for a stable climate to support all life gets most of the media coverage but it is far from our only existential predicament. Humankind faces many other existential crises often referred to as a polycrisis or metacrisis. Crucially, there is just one thing that all the crises have in common—they are symptoms of growing past planetary limits or overshoot.

These planetary life-supporting systems, climate, healthy oceans, biodiversity, soil nutrient cycles, freshwater health, and many more that we have pushed to the edge by growth are not just nice-to-haves but are the foundations of life for humans and all other life forms.

The fundamental problem with continual growth is perfectly captured by the economist Kenneth Boulding and ecologist David Attenborough who have both said anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist. Even the World Health Organization refers to policymakers as having a pathological obsession with GDP.

The fact that there are limits to endless growth seems patently obvious, but somehow despite all the evidence of the threat to our existence of the exceedance of planetary boundaries our politicians and the economists called on for comment by our news media seem oblivious.

Growth requires not just ever more non-renewable materials but also increasing amounts of energy, and having more energy demands more resources and drives up ecological footprints—this feedback loop inherently driving environmental destruction. Luxon’s stated goal is increasing GDP, but the simple fact is that GDP, energy consumption, carbon emissions, material use, and ecological footprints are locked together. Thus, increasing growth inescapably means increasing environmental harm. Notwithstanding that harm, there is for Luxon the self-defeating reality the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries has recently warned about—that the consequences of continued growth will likely mean a 50 percent decline in global GDP this century.

The response from economists to the clear links between growth and harm is usually claims of a decoupling of emissions and environmental harm from GDP. However, these claims don’t stand up to scrutiny as it is thermodynamically impossible to decouple economic growth from planetary harm without drastically reducing energy consumption. While faint evidence of a decoupling of emissions and growth can be found at high-income levels, the evidence shows that emissions are in lock-step with per-capita GDP.

We are obligated to accept the reality that we move beyond growth to a post-growth world. This means replacing the goal of increasing GDP with the goal of improving human wellbeing, with the proviso that only what can be achieved within planetary boundaries can be allowed. This means aiming to attain human and planetary wellbeing, not affluence. This means accepting the challenging reality that wellbeing must replace the goal of affluence, which is spurred by economic systems that exploit nature and humans and is the cause of planetary overshoot.

Somehow, politicians, economists, all of us must come to the (for some) harsh realisation that almost all our economy comes from a predominantly one-way exploitation of Earth’s ecosystems. A small part of what we take is regenerative, but by far the exponentially growing bulk of what we take from natural systems is a one-off non-renewable grab.

To have a hope for a liveable future, we must all accept that the goal of increasing GDP is suicidal, which means leaders who keep pushing it could be charged with ecocide. Getting this reality out to everyone, politicians included, will require media to seek input from ecologists as well as economists.

This article was originally published on Newsroom.

Mike Joy is an ecologist and senior research fellow at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington.