Conflict: Growth vrs the Environment

 As soon as students encounter the idea of GDP they are guided towards thinking about the possible drawbacks to growth, especially for the environment.

This is a fascinating area to discuss, and there is stacks of material you can use to address the key issue: is economic growth bad for the environment?

Very simply, there are two sides to this debate, which has just been aired in a special report in The Economist. The first side is what the public identify as the 'David Attenborough' style approach that I've paraphrased from the article:

Ever since man first picked up a spear, other species have suffered. Man wiped out .. the mammoths, the sabre-toothed tigers, the mastodons, the aurochs that roamed the planet before he did. When he sailed the Pacific, he killed off half the bird species on its islands. As his technology improved, so his destructive power increased. When he learned how to exploit the Earth’s minerals and hydrocarbons, he started to multiply ever faster, leaving ever less room for the planet’s other species. He chopped down forests, poisoned rivers and killed large numbers of the biggest sea fish and marine mammals. Many believe that, as a result, a mass extinction ... may be under way.

We can all identify with this view, which we recognise in much of the coverage of industrialisation in China. We know that rich countries prospered without worrying much about the environment, but poor and middle-income countries do not have that luxury. In 2012 world head of government met to discuss some frightening issues at the Rio+20 summit.

But before you go crazy and claim that Genghis Khan was good for the planet because he killed 40m people (to be fair, surely a joke) watch this video: Welcome to the Anthropocene.

The video is quite frightening, but it opens up the other side of the debate. In many ways, growth is good for the environment. It allows us to clear up old problems. Incredibly, it means that much of our consumption of 'stuff' is falling (my initial reaction to that finding was utter disbelief). The Economist argues that more growth, not less, is the best hope for averting a sixth great extinction. It's an astonishing claim, with a good deal of evidence to support it:

Many writers and economists are taking this approach. In the media you'll find frequent references to Matt Ridley and Bjorn Lomborg, who have an interesting - and sometimes upbeat - take on environmental problems.

This is huge (and important) area for discussion, often falling under the heading of environmentally sustainable development.