Ed Abbey, never one to mince words, once observed, "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell."

Gus Speth, a founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council and the World Resources Institute; one-time head of the United Nations Development Program; former dean of the Yale graduate environment program; and soon-to-be professor at Vermont Law is a little less strident but no less tough: "Economic growth may be the world’s secular religion, but for much of the world it is a god that is failing—underperforming for most of the world’s people and, for those in affluent societies, now creating more problems than it is solving."

The quote comes from a long piece in Solutions magazine that ought to be read and pondered by every policymaker, every politician, every economist, and every voter in the world. Will it be? Of course not. Secular religions are rarely challenged, but this one has to be, and soon.

One more quote. Dave Brower had his own spin, "economic growth is a sophisticated way of stealing from future generations."