There is right now an overwhleming amount and still growing ,with independent lines evidence, of much solid scientific and futurist literature on the  need for an emergency global de-growth of our Human Economy.  It is required now, although 2 generations ago would have been much better. The literature is now growing faster than the global economy. Any politician that calls for continued economic growth is asking to ruin our planet  faster.  Growthists in any form, should be declared to be lunatics and become forcefully retired, as fast as if they were discovered to have recieved a bottle of wine from a mining lobbyist. Ditto for any economist.

We need to reduce our throughput of key irreplaceable natural resources. We need to stop chopping up and devouring natural ecosystems by factory, wholesale. and global trade. We need to reduce our pollution production rates for green house gases. We need to stop clogging the oceans with plastics that are breaking down into microplastics that are crowding out the oceans phyto-plankton. We need to stop pouring nitrogen from agriculture into the oceans.  This time of cessation will come soon anyway, if only in the end, after our global civilization collapses, and billions of humans die young. Letting the economic growth machine struggle on, to substitute each new resource, one after another, to keep on going in its battle of human technology vs life, will likely make it impossible for humankind to repeat this process ever again.

It is now a serious question if it is better in long run to let collapse happen, or to start controlled degrowth now. Degrowth is an unstable process, but will still likely take longer than collapse. The question is , does the time integral of our remaining consumption with ongoing growth till collapse, be signficantly more or less than that from a more controlled degrowth. At the present time, the consumption of developed countries is still in much greater excess than developing nations, and therefore developed nations can make the biggest difference by diminishing human impact by either collapse or by de-growth. I tend to feel that the built up capital of developed nations will take some time to decay. Surgical removal of wealthy decadence power concentration will require assistance.

Maybe our demise as the most 'intellligent' and 'technological' species is for the best.  If our species does business as usual, and still survives in any form, it will be reduced to living in balance with a very damaged natural world, for several millenium. This is the time it will take for geological processing of our legacy of excess carbon dioxide emissions. It is still not long enough to replace entirely extinct ecosystems. If we somehow prove to be a resilient disease species for planet earth, our continued existance in damaging numbers and behaviour will ensure that nature never recovers. Perhaps in time, nature will develop an immunity, and evolve creatures and conditions for the new harsh times, that eventually overcome the descendents of the endless exploiting neo-liberal variant. Perhaps the lessons of permaculture and co-existance will evolve anew in our species. But only after we have been properly culled.

Gail Tverberg of http://ourfiniteworld.com, really likes this diagram, illustrating the fragility of our networked growth economies. Her often-stated thesis is that economies collapse rather than degrow gracefully, because they have abandoned old technologies and networks that were suited to a smaller size and throughput.  If so, then degrowth requires deliberate management and awareness to avoid collapse. Political avoidance of the question of degrowth indicates an actual death wish to achieve collapse rather than to degrow gracefully.  Its also a good metaphor for a stable network of ecosystems. Which extinctions, planetary boundary trespasses, and wildlife population collapses will lead to total ecological global collapse?

A human generation is maybe around 25 years, and an average human lifetime is about 70 years (80+ for developed world), our troubles are directly related to the exponential doubling times of population and technological capability.  We have used our technological capacity for resource subsitution and adapting to declining marginal returns by increases of scale of ecological exploitation.  Each successive doubling of our human population numbers, has been insulated from what should have been a growth constraint.  In engineering, growth contraints are sometimes called negative feedbacks, or "limiters", specifically designed to ensure that technogical marvels do not exceed safety margins.  The concept of safe limits for various domains for planet earth has been around a long time, but since at least 2009, the concept was officially christened, and all the key limits were studied and assembled in the one framework.

People who are 40 years old or more in 1998 are among the first people in history to have lived through a doubling of world population; people who are 75 years old have seen the human population triple.  Taken from Warren Hern "How Many Times Has the Human Population Doubled? Comparisons with Cancer."

http://www.drhern.com/pdfs/doubling.pdf

This  science work has been expanded and updated in the magazine Scientist and the most alarming results reported on various news sites.

http://reneweconomy.com.au/2015/how-it-took-just-one-generation-to-stuff-the-planet-94419

Here is a special link for Science Minister Greg Hunt, and for everybody else really, to a formal Wikipedia Article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_boundaries

Giles rightly points out in Australian vernacular that it's a generational thing. Also its a big 'Stuff Up'.  It is the big problem of our generation right now. He should have also said "exponential stuff up" .   He reminds us we marked the geological record with radiative isotopes spread world wide from the first atomic bomb testing in 1945. Now in 2015, it is now nearly a lifetime later from that event where we first demonstrated the capacity to end all life on earth.

Paul Crutzen in  2002 suggested we have stuffed up so much already that the Holocene geological era is officially over, and now we are in the Anthropocene. The Holocene was  the last 10-12 thousand years of  'mild' climate, to which we are gratefully adapted to. Now it likely will be 3-4 degrees C warmer during this century and for here on after.

 http://nature.berkeley.edu/classes/espm-121/anthropocene.pdf

As it is a do or die election  year every year in Australia, it is about time, that in the state of NSW, the largest political parties had their policy pretensions to rating environmental concerns as important , to be put to the test. 

The Liberal Party (coalition with National Party) were elected on a platform of putting 'Economic Benefits' first. They only just recently warped the mining legislation development approvals process yet again, to destroy the small town of Bulga, that had the temerity to fight and win its case in Land and Environment courts and Supreme Courts.  They have also overseen a destructive lust for Coal Seam Gas profits, and covered all the best bits of NSW with Mining Leases. They best represent the generations of thinking that has overproduced the global problems of impending extinctions. They also best represent the rich mining corporations , their lobbyists and wealthy elite investors who continue to profit, and who are sheltered from the growing inequality, unemployment, poverty and environmental destruction that has marked their periods of government. They think they deserve every dollar that comes to them.

After every big boom comes a fallout. The LNP wasted the mining boom, as far as the rest of Australia was concerned, since their collaborators were the chief beneficeries. Their campaigns against the mining tax and carbon price, on behalf of their crony industries, speaks volumes on their sense of entitlement to wealth and power. A collapsing economy suits the very wealthy as they can buy up everying going for fire sale. The acquisitions of Oligarchs in Russia and Ukraine tell what its going to be like. The economic collapse in the USA is also accompanied by a vast increase in wealth of the very rich. So the LNP will tend to want the path of collapse. There is a historical and contemporary tendency for government allowed collapse to become overt fascism, with government control on behalf of the wealthy. Descriptions of big capitalist instigation of and response to collapse are numerous. Read "The Shcock Doctrine : The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein for instance. Or look at Europe in the past and even now. Manipulation in Paris - http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/01/19/manipulation-in-paris/

The Labor Party on its record in government can best said to be trying to be the same as the Liberal Party for economic growth and mining Australia to bits. The Labor Party has a history of being the 'workers conditions and rights party' In recompense for occasionally letting them take over, they still try to ameliorate worker and social conditions, while driving the generic results of growth and supporting the same kinds of society as the LNP. The Labor party was ruinously corrupt in state government in NSW, although admittedly their were some thoroughly rotten bad apples.

The Greens Party messaging has not been effective, as it does not communicate well to those that want consumer paradise to go on forever. Looking after our ecological heritage is the best possible long term economic management. This requires a different world view to goals promoting material acquisition.

In fact all political parties are faced with the disease of declining civilization, which is declining marginal returns, and in particular, declining returns to complexity. It would fairest to admit it, and then get on with the adaptation to our "long descent" as we get reduced to a manageable size by nature. The efforts of the wealthy to hold on to extreme wealth and power in these circumstances is counterproductive, as they become insular and nasty to the fate of the majority. Witness the current Australian government. This normally leads to political revolutions and "heads will roll".

The trend of agreement on economic growth for entrenched political parts is that it is always good,  and the subtext is that'greed is good', 'privitization is good'  (for which-ever side is in power), rules as a so far unshakable ideology shared by all large political parties who have ever had the chance to be corrupted by power in office. This is a sick System 'Feature' of our current global civilization. The analogy of sofware bugs, features, and things to be waited for in the next release of software was really invented by political parties. It is a human failing.

The writing is on the wall, repent all, ye human kind, or be exterminated as a species by the wrath of your own Karma.  The religionists and the atheists, the scientists are all the same. Destiny is pre-figured by history. History determines our world state, and our current drives and values. Our current drives and values determine our future. Richard Slaughter, has summarized in a very clear way in a newish book, "The Biggest Walk-Up Call in History", with good sourcing of material and references to the afore mentioned growing pile of human writing on our predicament. It is rewarding to read, and supplies some of the best around and most useful framework concepts and classifications to put everything in place, and points to where the optimistic approaches and oppertunities still are, in the interiors of individuals and our social groups. To change our future we must first change ourselves.

He quotes Michael Greer, for instance, in terming our situation a 'predicament', which has no solutions, but must be lived through, such that we bow down to inevitable while keeping our reality a living reality.  Todays political media present boxed-in, disassociated and isolated 'problems', which is what 'politicians' think about and try to 'sell' or 'solve'.  The predicament is the framework in which all our temporary solutions must fit, and hence all 'solutions' are suspect.

Unlike the internet goliath Amazon.com(.au), the "WAKE-UP CALL"  book is available as in electronic form for a reasonable fraction of the price of the tree-killer version. In fact it isn't available from Amazon at all. I have no affilliations with the author or his associates.

http://www.foresightinternational.com.au/shop/epub-downloads

Wake up, Politicians!

In the spirit of the Wake Up Call book, this is a wake-up call echo. Its time for all politicians, from all parties, (including Greens), to start talking seriously about how we do the really civilized thing and degrowth our economies, in fitting response to our existential predicament. The problem to face head on, is the need for serious de-growth of our economy in the senses best described by ecological economists.  Any economist who is working for the political parties, who isn't an ecological economist, please leave now. This subject should be given the most weight in all speeches, all election forums, and get the most discussion in the media, including the controlled Murdoch and mining press.

All state and federal government budgets should be assessed by Ecological Economists to see if they allow for graceful and socially just de-growth.

All current distructive mining projects should be reassessed and halted if they are not delivering an environmental divident to future generations.

All proposed new projects and spending should be assessed by Ecological Economists to see if they restore more of nature than they destroy and contribute to a steady degrowth in the economy.

Other policies and trends should be reversed.  Income de-inequality. Localization instead of Globalization. Permaculture and Conservation to replace Soil Mining of Agriculture. Reduction of carbon emissions to be made to exceed the growth rate of Renewable Energy infrastructure. Our species survival, like all species, depends on local survival, adaptation and local co-evolution. Our extinction may be gauranteed by global trade treaties.

"Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad or an economist." - Kenneth Boulding (an Ecological Economist).

Or maybe such believers includes the still currently the Prime Minister of Australia in January 2015, and the current Treasurer. What they actually believe in, is a growth in earners to the investors and financial speculators who have the most influence on public policy. The average person has nothing to lose by dumping such policies and politicians.

If in fact the sensible de-growth of economic throughput measures are not adopted soon, all realists should know that their only future lies in a coordinated coup of this present decayed and corrupted so called democratic governments, and replacement by a dictatorship of qualified ecological economists and planetary physicians. It may become necessary to have 24 hour broadcast of boring ecological propaganda, and permaculture education, and with programs about reuse and recylcing radio and TV shows every day. So if you don't want this future, its time for those wishing to remain in the current political 'stuff up'  to start talking and display local, social, national and planetary conciousness.

Evolution doesn't bend its rules for anyone, not even a talkative, mystical primate. The human plague is following its pre-ordained path, and the final outcome is likely to be grim indeed. Although we have no option but to do our genes bidding, we would do well to, try to spare the biosphere's other progeny to whatever extent we can.

- Reg Morrison in Plague Species ( also published as "The Spirit in the Gene" )

http://www.amazon.com/The-Spirit-Gene-Humanitys-Illusion/dp/0801436516

 There 's some genetic determinism for you. Quantum Physics is also said to be very deterministic.  But we do not yet know what our informed choices will be.