NPG President: Population Pressures Demand That U.S. Renounce Cherished Goal of Economic Growth

• NPG
• October 28, 2013
• Press Releases
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Alexandria, VA – There is a limit to how fast and how far the American economy can grow – and we’re approaching it soon.

That’s the message Negative Population Growth’s president, Donald Mann, has posted on the organization’s website, www.NPG.org.

Mann, who has headed up NPG since its founding in 1972, is advocating that the U.S. start moving toward a steady state, non-growing economy very soon in order to create “an economy that would be sustainable for the very long term and afford an adequate standard of living for all, in a sound and healthy environment.”

Mann holds forth that:  “Oil and natural gas will very probably not be available in commercial quantities much beyond the end of this century if that long, with coal lasting perhaps a half century more.”

With the fossil fuel era having driven economic growth – which fostered the population explosion of recent decades – NPG has long held that it is crucial that we act now to slow, halt and eventually reverse population growth because an ever-growing industrial society is incompatible with vast numbers of people.

Toward that end, Mann contends:  “The goal of economic growth is no longer valid, for the overwhelming reason that our economy is part of our environment, and no material growth can continue forever in a finite universe, that is to say the world we live in.  If economic growth is persisted in it will lead eventually to the ruin of our environment, resources and standard of living, rather than the promised riches and abundance.”

Recommendations in Mann’s text for bringing forth a smaller population for the U.S. include “an end to mass immigration and a somewhat lower fertility rate that could be reached by encouraging women to stop at two children.”  He declares:  “We believe that we should aim for a U.S. population (now 316 million heading rapidly toward a half billion) of 100 to 150 million, and a world population (now six billion heading rapidly toward nine billion) of not more than one to two billion.”

Mann’s conclusion: “The worship of GDP, the great secular religion of our time, must be renounced, or it will eventually lead to the destruction of what it promises to deliver but cannot:   per capita income and wealth.”