"Perhaps no single idea is more deeply embedded in modern political culture than the belief that economic growth is the key to meeting most important human needs including alleviating poverty and protecting the environment."(1)

• Showing that the growth has taken place through the production of goods and services that are inherently valuable and beneficial [rather than investment in the stock market];
• Demonstrating that these goods and services have been distributed widely throughout the society; and
• Proving that these benefits outweigh any detrimental effects of the growth process on other parts of society."(2)

Steeped in market ideology and highly responsive to corporate interest, our market-driven institutions (governments as well as corporations) pay little attention to environmental concerns. Their efforts have centered on ensuring that the business elite have full access to whatever resources remain with little regard for the broader consequences.

"Sustained economic growth is not possible because human economic activity already fills the available ecological space. Furthermore, economic growth is not the key to human progress. Human well-being depends more on how available physical resources are used than on increasing the rates of their extraction and consumption."(3)

"We are no longer talking about an expanding pie of resource consumption. Rather, we are talking about the allocation of a finite flow of physical resources through our economic system to meet the needs of the more than 5 billion inhabitants of our planet …"(4)

"There is enough for all of Earth's people to live well, though not extravagantly, at current levels of resource use - but only if we share what we currently have with each other and if population growth is brought under control with due speed. … . The necessary change in lifestyle and economic organization required will not be easy. The barriers posed by existing social values and institutions are enormous. The end result, however, need not involve significant deprivation. The changes are, in fact, more likely to be liberating - particularly to the extent that they result in freedom from economic slavery, restore a sense of community and the beauty of our environment."(5)

1. Korten, David C. When Corporations Rule the World. 2d ed. Copublication of Kumarian Press and Barrett-Hoehler, 2001. p. 43.
2. Ibid. p. 45-46.
3. Korten, David C. "Development, Heresy, and the Ecological Revolution : An Open Letter to the Industrialized World." In Context : A Quarterly of Humane Sustainable Culture (Summer 1992). p. 3. http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC32/Korten.htm
4. Ibid. p 4.
5. Ibid. p. 5