To gauge the prospects of sustainability on our planet requires a single formula – population times per capita resource consumption. This is the scale of the human economic subsystem with respect to the global ecosystem on which it depends and of which it is a part. The global ecosystem (the natural world) is the source of all material inputs feeding the economic subsystem and the sink for all its wastes. Population times per capita resource consumption is the total flow of resources from the ecosystem to the economic subsystem, then back to the ecosystem as waste. In this chapter, Goodland argues that we have reached the limits to throughput growth and that it is futile to insist that such growth can still alleviate poverty in the world today. We thus need to devise other strategies, such as qualitative development. Many local thresholds have been broached because of population pressures and poverty; global thresholds are being broached by industrial countries’ overconsumption.
